I’ve been ripping my DVD’s to my Network Attached Storage drive so that I can stream them to my new AppleTV. Sometimes I’ll rip movies while I’m sitting at my desk at work to an external hard drive, then just take that home to move the movies over. However it’s taking forever to move the files around my network.
I have a pretty simple set-up. One linksys wireless router with 4 ethernet ports in the back (no, I don’t know the exact model, however it’s a couple of years old). I have two Western Digital MyWorldBook NAS drives plugged into the back of the router. One is a 500GB, and the other is a 1 TB drive. Both support 100mbs or 1gig ethernet speeds. When I went to move the movie data from the 500GB drive to the 1TB drive, it took about 3 days to copy the data. True it was about 20 files, each about 3 GB in size, but that still seems way excessive an amount of time. No way should it have taken 3 days to move 60GB of data.
But I thought I’d try another tack. The NAS drives have a USB slot on them for attaching an external hard drive. So I plug in the portable drive and drag and drop from there to the NAS drive. Should be pretty quick, as they’re connected directly together (both usb 2.0) It now takes 2 days to move about 100GB of data.
It just doesn’t make any sense to me. Because I’m using my laptop to connect to the drive are the files somehow going through my computer? I’m using Windows Media Center edition with all the recent updates. But I’ve never heard of files going through the computer to get between two network drives.
If you’re using Windows Explorer to drag and drop files from one network-attached device to the other, the contents of the files are, as you surmised, passing through your laptop. You should consider plugging your laptop into the wired network, if you haven’t done so already.
Thank you for the answer. It doesn’t make sense why it’s working that way, but at least now I know what’s going on. Is there any way of direct copying files? What if I try it from the command prompt after mapping the appropriate drives?
The NAS I have have a web page control where I would be able to command the NAS to read the USB and copy it to the disk. Or alternitivly I could open a linux shell on the device and copy stuff via the command line. You need to be commanding the NAS directly otherwise you are telling your laptop to read a file and copy the contents somewhere else.
toadspittle, All NAS things I have seen are low powered (both in electric power and processing power) computers that are intended to primarily act like network drives.
I’ve had a quick gander at the manual (pdf) and didn’t spot anything useful in the fle management area, but it does appear that the NAS is a Linux-based box, so you may well be able to log in via Telnet.
I haven’t heard much good about the WorldBook drives. The web is full of complaints of them being s-l-o-w-w-w-w, and some issues about heavy-handed “rights management” where they won’t allow you to share certain types of media files.
If you’ve got a desktop PC that’s always on, and has sufficient disk space (or has internal room to add another drive) you might be better off using it as the file server.
If that’s not workable, there are “real world” NAS devices that don’t need flaky software eg: MioNet) installed on your PC to be used. Generally, these come in the form of an empty enclosure, and you then pick whatever size drives to install, and you can select different levels of RAID.
Thanks all, I’ll see if I can telnet into it. I don’t hold out a lot of hope. But at least now that I know the problem I can try and minimize the impact on me.
gotpasswords I agree that the MioNet software is crap. I couldn’t even get it to see the drive on my local network, let alone over the internet. But if you don’t use that, and just browse to the drive via windows explorer or something I haven’t actually had any problems. I can stream a movie from it to my AppleTV over the wireless network without any slowdown. So if you totally disregard the included software (which does admitedly make it a pain to set it up initially) it’s a pretty good home solution for a NAS device.