Hanslow

Hi All,

Just after an idea of projected speeds with a wireless NAS drive. I'll tell you my setup, give you a filesize, and ask for how fast you think it should be. I think it's running slow, but would like to hear theoretical figures.

I've got a NAS drive RJ45 cabled into the back of my DG834G 54Mbps router which lives downstairs. The machine I've done the file transfer test on is upstairs. The signal strength on my netgear monitor is 6 or 7 blobs (fluctuates) out of 8. The wireless is WEP encrypted (not all my devices support WPA ), SSID hidden, MAC filtered.

The NAS drive has a 7200 rpm drive in it, 16MB cache, access time around 9ms.

How long do you think it should take to transfer a 6MB file from the desktop to the network storage. Would be interested to see your workings out in arriving at figures and any quoted information web pages.

Cheers

Steve

RoadrunnerV2

Keeping things simple. Your on 6 bars (3/4) wireless. However wireless utilities are notorious for being inaccurate. Especially as standard wireless does quickly drop off on performance even though the indicated utility speed is fairly stable.

Say your on 18Mbit/s wireless connection* (true speed, which includes overheads would be 7.2Mbit/s). With WEP encryption reducing say overall performance by another 20% that would mean you have a throughput speed of 5.76Mbit/s or 0.72Mbytes/s.

* Wireless speeds fall back 54, 48, 36, 24, 18 so forth.

6MB * 0.72Mbytes/sec transfer would be 8.3secs.

But then, there are many factors to reduce performance such as signal quality. You might have a good signal but poor quality reducing speed even further resulting in the throughput during the transmission dropping from 0.72 Mbytes/sec to 0 Mbytes/sec. If you experience dropouts, then your average throughput could plummet. Also, if you have 11b clients connected on the network, they can reduce overall performance. Having 3rd party wireless adapters instead of NETGEAR's can reduce performance as well. The PC could have an issue. List goes on.

Hanslow

Well it took 45 seconds to copy the 6MB file I do have the router configured for b & g as the missus needs b for the DS (and I need it for my old laptop in the garage ).

All the wireless kit is Netgear, so I'd hope it works together

I'll do some more investigations and see how I get on. Thanks for the detailed response

Jubal

I've just tested my setup and a 6meg file copied wirelessly from a laptop to a mapped drive on NAS (Linkstation) was about 3, maybe 4 seconds. I am running G only, WPA etc. Not sure how this helps other than yo give you a benchmark but my guess is that your B support is dragging you down.

Hanslow

Turning off b support appeared to help a bit, but not a great deal. Still took about 10 seconds to do a 1MB file Interestingly (I think!), in a DOS shell, I can ping the router and it gives me a 1ms response time, so the ping appears to be finding the NAS drive very quickly, just appears to be a data throughput problem somewhere.

Jubal, thanks for the benchmark results, gives me something to aim for. Tests with the NAS cabled straight into my laptop showed very fast results, so there's clearly something network related going on here, but not sure what yet.