Slow Transfers to Thecus NAS Box

(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.