Slow Transfers to Thecus NAS Box

MadMax1412

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(To save typing, this is copied from a thread I raised elsewhere, but not getting much help from, hence asking the question at Tom's Hardware)

The situation at the moment....

I have a Win 7 64-bit computer (hereafter called Office) which I record various TV shows. I then trim up the shows and transfer them to a Thecus N2200 NAS box which has a 1GB 7200.12 hard drive in JBOD config (obviously since there's only one hard drive). The other hard drive bay is empty.

On the Office computer, I have mapped a drive to the folder "Shows" and "Movies" which I've created on the NAS box.

Most times that I transfer files from the Office computer to the NAS box, my transfer speeds are anywhere between 600 KB/s and 4MB/s (I've seen it as high as 6.02MB/s) and during these times my TV shows and movies which can be around 2GB in size normally transfer across in a very timely fashion.

Occasionally, for no rhyme or reason, the transfer speed will start around 100 KB/s and drop to around 26 KB/s so you can imagine how frustrating it is to see an estimated transfer time of 10 hours or more.

As mentioned in my previous thread, I can have slow transfer speeds and not make any changes or restarts and then have the transfer speeds back to high levels. Here's a quote from one part...

BTW, I had left the computer on overnight to finish transferring the 5 TV shows but something must have happened overnight as this morning there was a message saying it couldn't find \\N2200\Shows.

Of the 3 options available (try again, skip, cancel), I chose Skip and now it's continued on and is transferring at 1.02 MB/s.

As I was typing it finished the transfer and now there's only 1 file left to transfer (obviously the one I skipped). I dragged it onto the \\N2200\shows mapped drive and it initially started transferring around 5.5 MB/s to 6.02 MB/s and has slowly decreased to 4.08 MB/S but now looks steady around this level and my 1.66GB file looks like it will take a total of about 8 minutes to transfer as it's down to 573MB remaining with an estimated time of 2.5 minutes.

This is what really confuses me as to why my transfer rates can change so much. Most times I get the 4 MB/s transfer, but occassionally I get down to 20 kb/s. Now this is a perfect example as nothing was changed or turned off or on between the time I started the transfer of the 5 files last night, but at some stage the transfer rate dropped to a point where Win7 "lost" the connection to my mapped drive. Without turning anything on or off (other than my monitor) I was able to resume the transfer by pressing "Skip" and for it to continue at a high transfer rate.

I have checked the settings on the NAS box, and even though there's a section where you can schedule it to turn off, I have this disabled.

I'm starting to lean towards something in Windows 7. Perhaps some service is stopping which makes it "harder" to see network addresses, hence the slow down. Perhaps there's some "limiter" on the amount of data that can pass through the network adapter (I know that this sounds silly, but I'm grasping at straws).

Does anyone know of:

1) Any services I should check that should be running whenever I get slow transfer speeds.

2) Is there somewhere in the supposedly upgraded diagnostic ability of Win 7 I can go to see information/error message relating to LAN traffic? Perhaps it might show something long the lines of a timeline with transfer rates recorded, then any error messages and resulting slow downs.

Thanks

I wrote the above on 28th January 2010 on another forum, but as mentioned, the one reply I've had wasn't helpful. Since then, I've rarely been able to get transfers happening above 26kb/sec (yes kb/sec). This means I've resorted to putting a cross over cable to my WinXP computer, copying the TV shows over to it (at around 44MB/s which shows the NIC is ok) and then moving them from my WinXP computer to the NAS box. I've raised another post as to my shares on Win7 not able to be seen by my network media players, so that makes this problem more frustrating. If I've taped a show I want to watch on my NMP, I can't until I get it off the Win7 computer onto the NAS box since shares don't seem to work.

It's also affecting my Robocopy script. I have one which backs up my data to a "backup" directory on the NAS box. As mentioned, transfer rates have declined now to the point where my Robocopy script often stalls as it says it's lost the drive, and even when it does see it, the transfer of any changed files takes a month of Sundays.

Very frustrated.

Thanks in advance.
 

MadMax1412

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Thanks for your reply. One of the forums I found had someone mentioning an issue with AVG Free 9.0 which is what I used.

I uninstalled AVG, rebooted and was still having issues, so even having no anti-virus software didn't help.

BTW, I have my computers set with an IP address of 192.168.1.x where x ranges from 1 to 10. My ADSL modem access page is still the default 192.168.1.254.

I know the subnet mask on all machines is 255.255.255.0 but should I leave the default gateway blank or set it to 192.168.1.254. Ditto with the DNS server - should it be left as "Obtain DNS Server automatically" or should I set it to "192.168.1.254"?

Thanks
 

Andy2008

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The default gateway would normally be the address of the router. But if it's working, leave it alone.

I assume you have installed anti-virus software again.

In the Thecus admin page, you could try enabling uPnP in the Network->Service section, which might help the Windows 7<->Thecus box communication.

There may be updated Thecus software available, but you must assume that it will wipe all data from the Thecus box. It might not, but better to take a backup first.

You could also try transferring the data via FTP instead of CIFS.

Also, have you looked on the Thecus support forum (via their web site)?
 

MadMax1412

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Hi,

I've tried FTP as this was suggested elsewhere but it was just as bad.

I've also raised a ticket with Thecus and they wrote:

Windows use a protocol called NTLM authentication to do, but Vista/Windows7 default use only the new version of NTLM v2, the protocols use for communicate are different.

That's might casue the NAS not allow the login ID and password form Vista/Windows7 .


For Windows7 users want to access SMB/CIFS, since Windows 7 accepts NTLMv2 only and please do the following steps:

START -> search-> local security policy -> Security Settings-> Local Policies -> Security Options-> Network security: LAN Manager authentication level- > Change the option to "Send LM & NTLM - use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated"

I had already made this change as it was suggested on another forum.

I'm starting to think that perhaps my next step will be to put Windows back to it's starting configuration, following the instructions at http://tinyurl.com/rbn4sr . The reasons for this are two-fold.

1. I've made various changes to the registry, NIC settings, etc following advice on other forums trying to resolve this.
2. This morning and 2 nights ago, I noticed my network icon regularly changing to a green circle as it was reconnecting to the network. Not sure why it was doing that. At the time it happened 2 nights ago I was trying to upload photos to Facebook and it was taking forever. I checked my modem stats and it was saying that it had been connected for days, so I don't think the icon was indicating a "internet" connection issue, but rather resetting it's connection on my LAN.

As I mentioned in my original posts, I used to get fairly decent transfer speeds, but then it would occasionally only transfer at slow speeds, if at all. This progressively got worse to the point where now I rarely get decent transfer speeds. Since I haven't made any changes to my NAS box, nor changed how my LAN is configured (ie swapped out switches etc), I can only assume that it's been a combination of Windows updates, tinkering with settings (as suggested in forums), plus other software changes.