[PB2K]

Hi, I needed a new harddisk to replace my current 5 external drives and was looking for a nice 2TB external. The shop has plenty of choice, including NAS drives and external harddisks with just Ethernet connector.

I was interested in this because I have a macbook with gigabit ethernet. I figured it would be faster than firewire 400Mbit. I see this beautiful Mybook 1Gbit/s with 2Terabytes of space for a bargain.

Then the clerks tell me not to buy an ethernet harddisk because the performance is so bad. My question : How can it be bad if it is 1Gbit/s ? It should be really fast if I connect it straight to my macbook wouldn't it ?

[mduell]

The clerk is, surprisingly, correct. While the link speed (and real world performance) of gigabit ethernet is much higher than FW400, the internal controllers in consumer-grade NAS are quite poor and unlikely to exceed the performance of a decent FW400 chipset.

[Simon]

Yep. The interface is faster, but the CPU that bridges between SATA and Ethernet and runs the file sharing protocol is usually slow as molasses on consumer NAS.

[Camali]

So then is Time Capsule a bad idea? One reason I want to buy a Time Capsule (500gb) is to access files when not at home.

[Cold Warrior]

We're talking local network speeds. 'Slow' by those standards is still much faster than anything you'd get over your Internet connection. If you're looking to access files over the Internet while away from home, TC would be fast enough for that.

[OreoCookie]

Slow and fast enough are two different things. If you want to use your disk for backups, storage of music or videos and you only get a throughput of something like 10-12 MB/s, then this might still be plenty. I'm thinking of getting an ethernet harddrive and to put it in my parent's place for offsite backup purposes -- especially once I go abroad again.

[yoketee]

for your macbook a firewire 400 or USB2.0 HDD enclosure will work better than the NAS, because the performance of the macbook that you have is not going to be faster.

if you have a macbook pro, or a mac pro. you can add on a highend ethernet card which supports jumbo packets. that will give you very fast transfer. it also means you need to have a switch that supports the jumbo packets.

[Simon]

Umm, no.

FW400 or USB disks will be faster than the consumer NAS because there's no NAS bridging involved. It has zero to do with Ethernet speeds (the MB's Gigabit would actually be faster than both FW400 and USB).

No consumer NAS would come anywhere close to saturating Fast Ethernet let alone Gigabit. The problem with consumer NAS is their CPUs and the bridging. It's not the network or the Mac (or PC) you attach.