Good Lord I need help.. WD My Book World and MBP

[Spute]

I have a brand new Macbook Pro-- all basic/entry level bells and whistles. I have an Airport Express wireless router providing very good wifi in my home.

Here's my deal.

Background:
Bought a 1TB WD My World Book ethernet drive; Have it plugged in to the AE router; have the drive mapped to my desktop; I can access the shared music/video/download folders. So far so good.

I have another WD 1tb drive plugged in via USB to the ethernet drive with roughly 900gb of video, pics, and music on it.

Problem
I have THE WORST TIME trying to copy files over to the ethernet drive. Drag and drop works for very small files and really cannot handle any folder 1gb or more. The transfer time (if it trnsfrs completely) is ridiculous. Additionally, if I click a folder with many files (my zeppelin folder has the entire catalogue plus additional bootlegs and album outtakes) it can take as long as 5 minutes or longer for the list to populate.

I do not know of any other method to transfer the large amount of data and need your help! Is there another method of transfer? Is there a config I am missing? Is this thing just flat out the wrong drive to have?

Problem 2
After suffering the above issue, I tried pointing my Itunes directly towards the USB attached drive. I went to File/Add to Library/ and chose a few select folders of various sizes. I got the color wheel. I have also tried the drag and drop. Again- the color wheel.

What can I do here?

 

[deeddawg]

I have no experience with that ethernet drive, but in trying to hang a USB drive off my router (WNR2500L), the performance is pretty bad, on the order of 1.5 to 2 megabytes/second. I think the cheap network drives just aren't up to stuff.

I ended up loading Windows Server 2008 onto an old desktop (I have a license through MSDN Academic Alliance) and using that as a network file server. Even then the performance isn't the greatest for large files.

Also, wireless tends to add some slowdown compared to a hardwired ethernet port.

This is just general thoughts; again I have no experience with that particular drive so I don't know if what you're seeing is normal.

 

[Spute]

Thanks. It has been a real pain getting this going. I figured that the USB connection was not going to be of any improvement.

Funny thing: I tried moving files on my PC using Teracopy (killer app btw) and the stuff moves pretty quick. I am wondering why/where a conflict might be using my Mac.

 

[fehhkk]

Yeah, if you need to copy huge amounts of data over wireless, even with wireless N it's going to be slow ... I have an iomega NAS, and copying stuff to it it over wireless N, I get around 3.5-4MB/s at most when away from the drive.

Wired gigabit, I get around 13MB/s ... huge difference.

 

[Eddyisgreat]

I ended up loading Windows Server 2008 onto an old desktop (I have a license through MSDN Academic Alliance) and using that as a network file server. Even then the performance isn't the greatest for large files.

Windows Server 2008 (not 2003) is the worst for Apple users. MS didn't include AFP implementation, so not only is OS X network transfer slow, but it doesn't handle resource forks properly. Now we have to rely on extremely expensive 3rd party solutions like ExtremeZ-IP.

If it's just files you are servin', i'd looking into OpenFiler.

Of course OS X 10.6 Server is always an option (that i'm deploying now).

 

[deeddawg]

Windows Server 2008 (not 2003) is the worst for Apple users. MS didn't include AFP implementation, so not only is OS X network transfer slow, but it doesn't handle resource forks properly.

Interesting. I'd started out trying FreeNAS and it had issues with the motherboard LAN controller, switched gears to OpenFinder and had a bunch of trouble getting it to work right; never did figure out what I was doing wrong and I was tired of messing with it.

I figured I'd try Windows Server 2008 R2 as I know my way around windows better than linux these days and I decided it'd be easier to run TivoDesktop on the box than figure out pytivo. Between work and grad school I don't have a lot of time to mess around with this stuff.

Sounds like Windows Server 2003 would be a better choice? I have easy (and kosher) access to a variety of versions.

Thanks.