Copying files from external drive

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HippyEverAfter wrote:

Thanks for reply but i was posting specifically about connection via a usb cable.

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Part of the answer is that even if the USB drive is connected to the NAS you might actually be copying the data over wifi.  For instance, if you do a drag-and-drop from finder, the data is read by the NAS from the external drive, transfered to the mac over wifi, transfered back from the mac again over wifi, and then written to the NAS to the internal array.

To avoid the network copy altogether, you need to use the built in backup job in the NAS to do the copying.  Otherwise, as CPU8088 says, you should connect the mac to your network with ethernet, and attach the USB drive to the mac.  That copies over the network only once, and ethernet is faster and more reliable than most wifi links.

How fast the various ways copying are depends on what ReadyNAS model you have and what firmware it is running.  Can you provide that information?