DSM-G600, DNS-3xx and NSA-220 Hack Forum

First - it's most likely not the NAS - but your network.  Don't assume that because your laptop is 3m away from the router you have a good connection, take it from me that may not be so.

Second - if what you expect your NAS to do is work like a "normal external drive" - then stop now, take the drives out, pack everything back in their boxes and return it, get a refund and buy an external drive - NAS & DAS are two completely different things.

This unit is quite capable - it's not as fast as an external drive - but then it's a different technology - so don't expect it to be - on a 100 mbps LAN max throughput is a theoretical 100 mbps, on USB2 that would be, again theoretical, 480 mbps - that is a significant difference - and NAS being more complex, has performance overheads that DAS doesn't, so it's not just interface speeds that determine performance.

In terms of the DNS-323's capabilities - check the outside of the box for D-Link's claimed performance - I see no reason to doubt that the device can meet them, personally, I have achieved close to those figures ~70+ mbps on a 100 mbps network and ~170 mbps on gigabit - and the unit will quite happily run all day at those rates until you run out of storage space - the largest single file I've transferred is >70GB, and the longest time I've had the unit constantly active is in excess of 6 hours - a ~12GB bulk transfer of several thousand small files.

So - let's look at your network ...

Tcp/ip is designed to be a self healing technology - when it detects an error in a data packet, it retransmits the data packet, most of the time without your being aware of it.  You can have a very sick network, with seriously high error rates and at low transmission rates, the errors can and often do go unnoticed, because there is sufficient bandwidth - but as the transmission rate increases, the errors increase, so the retransmissions increase, which adds to the traffic, which adds to the errors, which adds to the retransmissions, which adds to the traffic .....

You get the idea?

You eventually reach a point where everything is either an error or a retransmit of an error and no data flows.

Wireless networks - because of their nature - are more prone to errors, especially errors caused by interference, AND also have a lower bandwidth, making them more prone to the type of failure I mention above

Now - plug an ethernet cable into your laptop, eliminate the wireless side of the equation - and let us know how things work out.

Glad to hear that you know your frustration is the wireless - I frequently see situations where folks purchase one product, in the belief it works like an entirely different product and then become upset when it doesn't work the way they anticipate.

I'm not suggesting that you plug your laptop in permanently, but more as a test - once we establish that the problem is the wireless then we can look for ways to fix it - I would also suggest that you hold off on investing money in 802.11n wireless, chances are you'll be disappointed there, especially if you have environmental issues affecting the present installation.  Yes, n wireless is supposed to overcome many of the problems with the older stuff, but it's not magic, and more important, the final spec has not been ratified, so it is still subject to change - oh - your friend may be connected at 260 mbps, ask him to transfer a large file and time it, see how much of that 260 he actually gets

This may be a bit out of the scope of this forum, but what sort of wireless do you have - especially - what sort of wireless card is in the laptop - the reason I ask is that there is one particular brand of internal card, used in many brands of laptop, that has a known problem, with symptoms that match yours - and there may be a very easy fix.

Last edited by fordem (2008-04-19 15:28:23)