any air owners with a NAS?

[desistyle]

Due to the small size of the flash storage, I decided to buy a 1TB NAS to hook up to my access point.

I've noticed that my PS3 (which is hard wired into my access point) can access my NAS at blazing speeds....unfortunately, I can't say the same for my Air..

My access point is G, and I've noticed that the speed isn't quite as fast as I expected it to be. It takes long to copy files, and the whole time machine experience just feels very sluggish (for example when I click the time machine icon in my dock it takes 15-20 seconds "connecting to backup" before the interface appears).

Question is...would getting a N router significantly speed up my access to the NAS? I read somewhere that it wouldn't but I totally thought having a N router speeds would help...

 

[monaarts]

Due to the small size of the flash storage, I decided to buy a 1TB NAS to hook up to my access point.

I've noticed that my PS3 (which is hard wired into my access point) can access my NAS at blazing speeds....unfortunately, I can't say the same for my Air..

My access point is G, and I've noticed that the speed isn't quite as fast as I expected it to be. It takes long to copy files, and the whole time machine experience just feels very sluggish (for example when I click the time machine icon in my dock it takes 15-20 seconds "connecting to backup" before the interface appears).

Question is...would getting a N router significantly speed up my access to the NAS? I read somewhere that it wouldn't but I totally thought having a N router speeds would help...

I have the 13" Ulimate and have a 1TB NAS drive hooked into my Netgear Dual Band N Router (this one: http://powershift.netgear.com/Produ...relessRoutersforHighPerformance/WNDR3700.aspx)... And it works awesomely! I use it strictly for movies for my Apple TV 2... I have about 150GB of movies already and it takes about 3-5 minutes to transfer an HD movie (12.5Mbps average transfer rate I guess).
When I start watching a movie on the TV2 it takes about 15-20 seconds for it to start playing but has 10 minutes of the movie buffered within a few seconds. So what that means is the write speed is much slower than the read speed of my NAS drive.
It works well for me though because I only use like 12-15 GB for music right now (assume I have 30GB by the time I get rid of this). The rest is for files, OS, etc...
Overall, I would recommend investing in a dual band N router, you won't be let down!


- Joe

 

[Tomorrow]

Question is...would getting a N router significantly speed up my access to the NAS? I read somewhere that it wouldn't but I totally thought having a N router speeds would help...

You would see a noticeable improvement in speed over G, but still nowhere near as fast as hard wired.

 

[desistyle]

what advantages does dual band offer?

 

[monaarts]

what advantages does dual band offer?

It basically keeps things on different frequencies and almost on different mini-networks. Here is how mine is setup:

2.4GHz Band:
My iPhone 4
Fiance's iPhone 4
Fiance's iPad

5GHz Band:
My MBA
Apple TV 2

So basically, the more devices you have on a single band the more clogged up. So it breaks them up into two but they can still communicate with devices on other bands. I went from a single band N with the same setup to the dual band and noticed a substantial difference.


- Joe

 

[desistyle]

Oh, i should have fully read your post..nevermind!

 

[ritmomundo]

It basically keeps things on different frequencies and almost on different mini-networks. Here is how mine is setup:

2.4GHz Band:
My iPhone 4
Fiance's iPhone 4
Fiance's iPad

5GHz Band:
My MBA
Apple TV 2

So basically, the more devices you have on a single band the more clogged up. So it breaks them up into two but they can still communicate with devices on other bands. I went from a single band N with the same setup to the dual band and noticed a substantial difference.


- Joe

I also have the same Netgear router, but I didn't really know to separate my devices like that on the 2 bands. I know, it should be obvious to do, but the reason why I didn't is that the 5ghz band always shows a weaker signal than the 2.4 ghz band (I dont know why this is, is yours?), so I always connect everything to the 2.4 ghz. I do notice a slowdown when theres a lot of devices connected.. I will try separating them and see if it helps. Thanks for the tip!

 

[monaarts]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

It basically keeps things on different frequencies and almost on different mini-networks. Here is how mine is setup:

2.4GHz Band:
My iPhone 4
Fiance's iPhone 4
Fiance's iPad

5GHz Band:
My MBA
Apple TV 2

So basically, the more devices you have on a single band the more clogged up. So it breaks them up into two but they can still communicate with devices on other bands. I went from a single band N with the same setup to the dual band and noticed a substantial difference.


- Joe

I also have the same Netgear router, but I didn't really know to separate my devices like that on the 2 bands. I know, it should be obvious to do, but the reason why I didn't is that the 5ghz band always shows a weaker signal than the 2.4 ghz band (I dont know why this is, is yours?), so I always connect everything to the 2.4 ghz. I do notice a slowdown when theres a lot of devices connected.. I will try separating them and see if it helps. Thanks for the tip!

My 5ghz band is only a few % weaker than my 2.4ghz but u gave heard this is normal. I tested both and did a transfer from my MBA to my nas drive and the 5ghz was definitely faster. I have my 2.4 ghz band named "yourslow" and my 5ghz named "awesome". Haha. Just thought I'd let you know.

 

[chaoticbear]

Checking in here - it takes me just under 10 minutes to transfer a 1.5 GB file across my network - back of the envelope calculations... 2 Mbps? Really? I didn't realize it was that slow, but it is still enough to stream across the network. It's wireless-N and everything!

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)



My 5ghz band is only a few % weaker than my 2.4ghz but u gave heard this is normal. I tested both and did a transfer from my MBA to my nas drive and the 5ghz was definitely faster. I have my 2.4 ghz band named "yourslow" and my 5ghz named "awesome". Haha. Just thought I'd let you know.

We were uncreative. When ours was split (not necessary now since we hard-wired the Wii, the only G device in our house) we just added "5 GHz" to the end of our SSID. ("Cum, titties and butt****ing", because we're juvenile and love the idea of our neighbors wondering who that is.)

 

[neteng101]

I have an older 2.4ghz N - 1st gen 500gb Time Capsule, hooked up to a Synology NAS.

Plenty fast from the MBA to the Synology NAS, and my Time Machine backup go to the Time Capsule, which isn't as speedy for file transfers as the Synology.

 

[spob15]

I liked illmatic the best but it was written was good too

 

[cleric]

I can usually do a little over 20MB/s on my wireless N network, which may not seem fast but its almost 200mbit so its probably a negligible difference on USB2. Is your current accesspoint gigabit or 100mbit, if its 100mbit and the ps3 is "blazing fast" then you would be more than happy with wireless N.

Also my AP is dual radio so I have 2.4ghz 20mhz B/G radio and a N only 5ghz 40mhz radio.

Smallnet has all the speed tests you will want to see when buying a router, you will see the difference between N only and 5gh/2.4ghz. I see the newer linksys ones are getting 40MB/s which would beat usb2.
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless

 

[flynz4]

Checking in here - it takes me just under 10 minutes to transfer a 1.5 GB file across my network - back of the envelope calculations... 2 Mbps? Really? I didn't realize it was that slow, but it is still enough to stream across the network. It's wireless-N and everything!]

That looks like 20 Mbs to me. Did you convert from Bytes to bits?

/Jim

 

[chaoticbear]

That looks like 20 Mbs to me. Did you convert from Bytes to bits?

/Jim

i thought I did; 1.5MB/10min=12Mb/10min=1.2Mb/min=order of magnitude fail

You're right, of course.

 

[ReallyBigFeet]

I've got a ReadyNAS Duo on my desktop at home. There are literally thousands of threads on the Netgear forums talking about the difference it wired versus wifi speeds over Mac and/or Windows PC's.

Basically, no matter how good a signal, even with WiFi G, the speed WRITING will be bad. Go wired if you need to copy stuff over to the machine.

But streaming...should work just fine over WiFi. No issues there.

 

[double329]

I am using my MBA with DIY OpenNAS (4TB). It had some trouble at first, but after doing some research. I have resolved the issue. It works really great now. It works so well, I have all my photos and video saved on the NAS box. I use LightRoom for photo which read all photo off the NAS box. Video is streaming very smooth. I do use 5ghz N wireless.