File transfer speed on a network hard drive

Iwannahurl

I need to backup a large volume of media files, mostly digital photos.

I have now connected a 2TB Iomega network hard drive to the (UPC) router, as per instructions.

When I tried to transfer the folders, 292GB in all, it told me it was going to take 2 days and 6 hours to do the job. At one stage that time plummeted to a dizzying 1 day and 23 hours, but after an hour or two it went up again.

I checked the transfer speed and it was 1.86MB per second. That almost takes me back to the old days of Eircom dial-up!

Is this the best that can be expected? Or is there a way to speed up the process?

Sup08

Connect the drive directly to you PC first for the transfer, there should be a USB port.

Iwannahurl

That's what I've decided to do.

I tried the router option first because (a) I wanted a network drive and (b) the Iomega guide said to do so for "best results".

Now I'm back to using the "network drive" as a plain old USB plug-in jobbie.

Going by the numbers you were getting 1.86MB per second. Not 1.86Mb. Learn the difference because there's no point in talking about transfer speeds in the wrong units.

If your computer and NAS are both wired to the router then you would expect max ~10MB/s with a 10/100 router and ~100MB/s with a gigabit router. Cheap routers are usually only 10/100 and i'd say that's what you have.

If your computer is only connected via wifi, then your speeds are going to be much slower. How much slower depends on type of wifi, signal strength, local interference etc. But 1.86MB/s sounds pretty typical.

Even if you had a gigabit network, the hardware in your NAS would probably be the bottleneck. Cheap all-in-one units usually have pretty slow processors and network cards.

Iwannahurl

1.86MB.

Twas but a typo.

wHat A dIfFerEnCe a CaSe maKeS!