Toronto Photography Meetup Group

That's pretty good speed. I'm getting about 9MB/s write speeds to a QNAP TS409 with a RAID-5 setup. Would definitely be quicker with RAID 0 or 1 but going for size with performance being sacrificed. I might have gotten a bit quicker before when there was just one switch between the NAS and the computer but using two dumb switches has taken a small bite in performance. Copying, it's much faster but can't remember the speed.

I haven't fully tested my Mediasonic unit with eSata yet. I had to work this past weekend till 2am! ACK! I'll give it a run tonight and post what I get.

The thing to keep in mind is, this is SOHO network attached storage applicances. If you want really fast performance you could build a Linux box and slap Samba on it or an open source NAS application. I have had up to 500Mbps speed between two Windoze boxes on my home network over the Gigabit LAN.
Personally, I got tired of keeping track of which external drive contained which content and switched to the NAS approach a few years back and have not looked back.
Your NAS device can take four spindles which is twice the capacity of mine but the RAID5 is a performance hit.
I think if it is reliable and reasonably fast then you have a good setup.

I was just going to mention that also. If you want something better and faster, especially one with network access, be prepared to spend a lot more if you want a solution out of the box or build your own. which is what I should have done with all the spare stuff sitting around the house. But then the thought of trying to troubleshoot/fixing something if it breaks vs something out of the box swayed me to something already tried and true LOL.

Not confused at all. 100baseT is 100 mega_bits_ per sec, approx 12MB/s but no one gets that, as others have already chimed in.

I'm copying 32gigs from the weekend's wedding from my laptop to my DNS323, and over 100baseT, 10megabytes per second is still rather slow.

I'd be happy to get about 20MB/s over the network, since I do get about 25MB/s transferring from my CF's to the internal HD on my laptop.

The DNS-323 has a Gigabit LAN interface, have you tried that? You may get better perfomance - I get upwards of 20MB/s with this configuration.

I am surprised you even get 10MB/s over a 100Mb/s network. You need to take into consideration at least a start bit and stop bit for each byte transferred in the serial protocol, plus other overheads such as collision/detection etc. But, I may be talking nonsense out of my @ss since the last time I learned this stuff was over 20 years ago

I _thought_ my laptop had gigabit, but unfortunately, it doesn't.

I'm thinking of getting an expresscard gigabit adapter for days like today.... 32 gigs over the network even at 10MB/s is still about 1hr.

Ok, just did some image saves from within Photoshop to the Mediasonic RAID unit using the eSATA connection.

534MB ~ 9.7sec
833MB ~ 19.8sec
1.40GB ~28.4sec

So just for kicks, did a quick test here using robocopy.

In each scenario, a different file was used (at least 750MB or larger).

Network: 1GB full duplix, two switches between the main computer and the other computer/NAS
NAS: QNAP TS406 with four WD5001AALS in RAID 5 configuration
eSATAL:NexStar 3 enclosure with a WD5000AAKS drive.
Main computer: Vista 64-bit, WD4000KD (OS on a different drive), overclocked E6600.
Other computer: Windows 7 32-bit, no idea what drive I got on there

First value is bytes/sec, second is megabytes/min

<b>Uncached file</b>

cmpt to cmpt: 35932839, 2056.093
cmpt to NAS: 10442217, 597.508
NAS to cmpt: 27098529, 1550.59
cmpt to eSATA: 71666667, 4100.799
eSATA to cmpt: 44156735, 2526.668

<b>Cached file</b>

cmpt to cmpt: 38159962, 2183.530 (difference not significant)
cmpt to NAS: 10605021, 606.824 (difference not significant)
cmpt to eSATA: 108789076, 6224.960
eSATA to cmpt: 105821474, 6055.153

I am a bit surprised by the throughput from the eSATA to the computer on a uncached file. Seems that the performance from the NexStar 3 enclosure is great going one way but not so good the other way, or it could be the drive but I doubt it... hmmmm.

Well, I'm still waiting on my second hard drive. The status is sitting now at "shipment in transit" - been like that for a few days. Just shot off an email to dell order support. I ordered this on the 14th and still haven't received it .. ugh. I've never had a problem with Dell before but this is ticking me off.

Could be they ran out of drives? Weird. My bro-in-law got his two drives on Friday as well...

Could be but they should at the very least send me an email saying that my order is going to be delayed for whatever reason. Bad customer service imo.

I hate that you don't get detailed tracking from them, but I guess you can't argue that when shipping is free. I bought the Sony noise canceling headphones on today's sale for $35. Hopefully your HDD arrives before my order or that's pretty messed up.

Uhmmm, hey SD, my headphones came in today, did your drive get there yet?

Yes!! I missed the Purolator truck this morning but I got a slip to pick it up today. Better late than never.

Good stuff!

you know a PIII running Freenas would probably be better.

www.freenas.org

I'm a Drobo + DroboShare owner. I have 4x1TB SATA drives in mine, and the Drobo really is a great unit.

However, the DroboShare is a total piece of garbage. The Drobo is ideal as a FW800 solution, but if you need to share it, hook it up to a Mac that can share the drive on your network.

You've been warned!

Can you elaborate on what you dislike about the DroboShare? Reliability? Performance? Just curious as I've been eyeing Drobos for a while, but have the NAS requirement as well.

This is moot point since I already received the second hard drive but this is the response I got after requesting a status update email to Dell. Lol.

**********************************************************

Thank you for contacting Dell Online Customer Care.

Your message has been received in the Dell Consumer Customer Care department. Since your account is with our Business department, we will not be able to address this issue. We would request that you contact our Business Customer Care Department at 1-800-906-3355 for further assistance in this matter. We regret that at this time, there is no e-mail option to contact that department.

For future issues, please contact our online customer care center at http://support.dell.ca.

Sincerely,
********************************************************

Ironic that they are a company selling technology and they don't have an email address for that department?

There's probably a good reason for that, everybody would be emailing them for various questions vs going through the website where they want people to find answers to questions that could be common questions, or a standard web form where the question would be directed to the proper area....