gdgt

It also depends on the size of the files you are moving around as well as if you are using Windows (Samba) file sharing, ftp, http or some other protocol.

You will see worse performance from lots of small files than you would from a single large file of the same size. This is just a side effect of the way that networks work. So you may want to try it with a single large file and find out if it gets any faster.

The protocol issue tends to revolve around what it was originally designed to handle and the networks it was intended to run on. Things like ftp and http were both designed to run over the internet where you could have a connection that was anywhere from a 28k modem up to an ethernet connection. So they tend to start the transfers a bit slower and increase in speed trying to figure out how fast they can go or they will just pick a reasonable speed to start at and if the client can't keep up they will step down. Though that kind of set up is more common in a hosting provider environment where you want to be able to gauge how many connections you can handle at a given time. On the other hand something like Samba or AFP were built to run on the local network with fast connections. But the implementations of Samba (windows file sharing[SMB]) can be very different depending on the platform. With these small boxes they probably won't be running MS Windows so it is going to be someone else's implementation of the SMB protocol. That may be Samba the open source build or it may be a fork of Samba that they took in house to work with their product. Now this is where you can get into the harder to troubleshoot situation because while it may work great with a Windows XP or 7 client your Mac might be really really slow. The company may not have spent a lot of time testing it for performance against Macs or the other way around. As long as it connected and could get files that might have been enough to put the check mark on the box saying they support your Operating System.

If you have access to other machines you may want to test with them after you have finished testing with some new cables or with a direct connection between the client and the NAS.

Hope that helps.

That sounds like either a misconfigured or defective interface. I've seen this with a failed or less than optimal auto-negotiation between a device and a switch. Does the poor performance persist if you directly wire your computer to the ReadyNAS (and do try swapping patch cables as well)?

Thank you for your great suggestions! I will give that a try.

Not familiar with that NAS, but it would help if you posted your network configuration.

Also, if it's capable of other things - background downloads, media transcoding, etc, I'd check that nothing else is running on the NAS that could cause a serious speed loss.