Need help with slow NAS speed for photos (i'm a neophyte so...)

[sfphotographer]

please excuse what may seem like idiotic questions....

I have a Western Digital My Book World Edition II - 4 TB (2 x 2 TB) Network Attached Storage that is hooked up to my Cisco Linksys WRT610N router. I use the NAS to store shared documents for my business, and more importantly, I use it to store my 1TB (and growing) of photographs.

I link my laptop (Dell E6410 with 8GB of RAM,--i don't think this is the weak link in my setup) using an ethernet cable to my router, and my NAS is connected to my router.

The challenge I'm having is that it can sometimes take up to 8 hours (yes you read that correctly) to download 8GB of photographs to the NAS (and this also includes time for my program (Adobe Lightroom) to create large previews of my photographs.

So, a couple of questions:

1. is there anything I can do with my existing setup to dramatically increase download speed?

2. If not, what new equipment should I consider purchasing to dramatically increase download (and photo loading) speed? Currently, it can sometimes take as long as 10-30 seconds to load a photograph in my Adobe Lightroom that is stored on the NAS, as Lightroom needs to create a large preview.

Advice? Thank you in advance...


Howard

 

[stevech]

Your LAN is gigabit ethernet? Your Laptop is too? Your NAS is too? Your router's switch is likely NOT. If this is the case, buy a gigabit Ethernet Switch ($30) and cable it to the router and put PC and NAS on the new switch.
If the PC or NAS is not gigabit Ethernet, you're stuck.

Hmmm. Some low end NASes I've seen achieve less than 5Megabytes/sec. Have you measured your WD?


It's worse if the NAS was setup with NTFS for the file system format, as these NASes run Linux.

PS: Your TB of photos ARE backed up somewhere in addition to the NAS, right? A NAS does not eliminate the need for backups.

For you, I'd suggest using a disk in an external enclosure with eSATA and hope your laptop has an eSATA port. Fast. Rather than a NAS.
Else you'll have to shell out $300-800 for a high performance NAS, IF you have a good gigabit ethernet LAN.

 

[sfphotographer]

Your LAN is gigabit ethernet? Your Laptop is too? Your NAS is too? Your router's switch is likely NOT. If this is the case, buy a gigabit Ethernet Switch ($30) and cable it to the router and put PC and NAS on the new switch.
If the PC or NAS is not gigabit Ethernet, you're stuck.

Hmmm. Some low end NASes I've seen achieve less than 5Megabytes/sec. Have you measured your WD?


It's worse if the NAS was setup with NTFS for the file system format, as these NASes run Linux.

PS: Your TB of photos ARE backed up somewhere in addition to the NAS, right? A NAS does not eliminate the need for backups.

For you, I'd suggest using a disk in an external enclosure with eSATA and hope your laptop has an eSATA port. Fast. Rather than a NAS.
Else you'll have to shell out $300-800 for a high performance NAS, IF you have a good gigabit ethernet LAN.

Hi Stevech,

Thanks for your response.

I'm looking into whether my laptop is gigabit ethernet.

Haven't measured my WD device. Again, pardon the completely ignorant question, but how do I go about measuring its speed?

The NAS was set up for a RAID system, but you're right in that if the whole NAS blows up, I'm seriously hosed. Thanks for your suggestion about the eSATA disk--I'm always worrying a bit about backup solutions. Any suggestions for ones that have automated software that will backup my photos (i.e., i don't have to do it manually as that's a bit of a pain for me)?

Thanks in advance,


howard

 

[stevech]

Backup: I use SecondCopy. Excellent. Low cost. Automated. But windows based.
I think if the NAS were decent (Synology/QNAP) it can also do an automated backup of selected folders on a schedule, to an external disk. I am NOT a fan of online backup services. Local disk - take a copy offsite to protect from burglary/fire. I use a 32GB thumb drive for copy #3 of my irreplaceable data - and financial data is encrypted as a virtual disk by SafeHouse (see website).

Test speed: create a file share on each computer. Do a copy/paste of a big file. Click in windows to see the xfer rate. And look at the wall clock vs. file size and do the math to get Mbps.

More elaborate: download/use QCheck. Freeware.