WD Network drive is Sloooow - Need info

[ukmgranger]

Hi All,

I have a Maxtor 1tb usb drive connected to my sage server which I keep all of my movies, mp3's, photos and documents on.

Last year, the drive went down and I lost all my movies!! Fortunately I back up everything else to other drives, but all the movies are ripped from DVD's, so I dont consider it "the-end-of-the-world" if I loose them (it is an awful lot of time wasted though ).

Anyhew - on to the point.

I heard the Maxtor clicking again in the same way that it did when it went down the last time, so I thought I should just get a new drive.

I went for a WD My Book World Edition 1TB network drive.

The drive seems to be soooooo slow!

I have tried watching one of the xvid movies from it (not through sage, just using quicktime) and it is really jerky.

I also keep an itunes photo library on there which I use on my mac, and it is increadibly slow. even playing a slide-show doesnt work well.

So - what is the solution? - where is the bottle neck?

My router is a D-Link DIR-635 to which I have connected:
sage server - PC (LAN)
sage client - mac mini (LAN)
sage client - PC laptop (WLAN)
sage client - HP MVP (LAN)

I don't know much about networking - so bear with me!

As the WD network drive is 10/100/1000 capable, Would it help to have a gigabit switch, which all of the LAN devices connect to that then connects to the router? Or will the traffic still be going through the router which is only 10/100?

I don't really want to change the router, as I need the wifi capability of it (I have an outdoor long range antenna connected to it that sends wifi to my office up the road).

Any ideas regarding what I should do???

[ukmgranger]

Looks like I should have done my research!!

I have had a quick hunt around online and found that there are masses of people saying that this drive performs VERY slowly.

I think I am going to erease my data and take it back - problem is, at it's slow speeds this could take another day or so to do!!

In my opinion (and many, many others in the internet) do not buy a WD NAS device. It is far too slow for any kind of media storage.

[Surtr]

I have the same drive (500GB), and was also experiencing slow performance, but was not using sage. I reformatted the hard drive and had much, much better luck after that.

[ukmgranger]

Originally Posted by Surtr

I have the same drive (500GB), and was also experiencing slow performance, but was not using sage. I reformatted the hard drive and had much, much better luck after that.

I have some questions for you!

1. Was yours the network version?

2. How did you reformat - is there a tool, or did you just do it through your OS?

3. NTFS or FAT32?

4. I assume that even though you reformatted the drive - the networking capabilities still worked fine? ie, this is not stored on the had drive.

[ukmgranger]

I have decided to take the drive back to PCworld.

I have now read s many articles regarding how slow this drive is, I don't Thisnk that it is worth the effort of trying to make it work better.

To PC Worlds credit, there were no questions asked. I handed over the drive and they gave me a full refund.

Just so people know - it was taking about 6mins to copy a 1.4gb file from the drive. For me, that is unacceptable.