Insanely slow copying 106GB from Mac Mini to NV+

After reading some other stuff in this forum, I rebooted the NV+, and restarted the copy. Now it's saying 17 hours, which isn't great, but isn't ridiculous.

It's amazing to me that in a mature product like this these sorts of bugs exist. How often do I need to reboot to make sure the NAS is performing reasonably well?

Argh. Now up to 44 hours.

And now 65 hours, climbing about about an hour a minute.

I'll see how things look in the morning. But this is absurd.

<sarcasm>Comforting to see how NetGear responds to this sort of problem. Maybe if they ignore it, I'll go away. That's a plan.</sarcasm>

Ultimately, I got the content to the ReadyNAS, but iPhoto was absurdly slow accessing the files there. So I bought an external Firewire drive, and am copying files back to the Mac.

I attempted the copy last night - OSX never got past the "Getting ready to copy" message, after 10 hours. I tried to copy some other files one-by-one, but I'm getting multi-hour estimates copying 1.5 GB.

My conclusion: The ReadyNAS is a slow piece of junk with OSX. Support from NetGear is nonexistant. This will be the last NetGear product that I buy.

i can see iPhoto taking a long time to copy over the network because of the large number of smaller files but that sounds ridiculous. you can try setting a static ip on the NAS and set the nic to 1000/full instead of auto (or the opposite if that's the way you are running now). You may also want to try a switch with jumbo frame support like the netgear prosafe and enable jumbo frames... i'm using a few of these in my setup and my copy speeds from my mac mini to/from the NV+ are decent (20-25MB/sec or so for large files). and if you have jumbo frames enabled now using that dell switch, you should turn that off b/c it's not supported. that could be your bottleneck.

i'm currently running lion on the mini with 4.1.8 T9 on the NV+. my performance hasn't changed from snow leopard and 4.1.7 T49

This is a community forum. Some posts get missed and users like me post in threads we get interested in. For support, it's best to contact NetGear technical support.

iPhoto not working well with the files stored on the NAS is a problem with Apple's design of the iPhoto application, not the ReadyNAS. NetGear can't do anything about Apple designing iPhoto to have the library stored on a local drive. You'll have the same problem with any NAS.

Storing the library on an iSCSI target could be worth a try. iSCSI presents data to your client machine as if it were on a local drive. There is a community add-on for the NV+, however this isn't supported by NetGear and the NV+ doesn't have the CPU to do iSCSI well. A newer ReadyNAS would be best if you want to try this.

Another option worth considering is to use Aperture rather than iPhoto. See http://sphardy.com/web/readynas/aperture-workflow-with-readynas/

Been talked about for a while now, I have the same kinds of problems..

Check this thread

viewtopic.php?f=28&t=26270

I got the iPhoto library copied over to the NAS evenutally, and as others have discovered, it's so slow as to be nearly useless. I gave up after a couple of weeks, and now I've got ANOTHER problem - I can't copy the files back to a local volume.

(I broke down and bought a firewire 2GB local drive, and have relegated the ReadyNAS+ to archival storage, since it's too slow for anything else.)

I've tried drag/drop in the Finder. It locks up at "preparing to copy"... like all weekend. I've tried CP, and it hangs. I've tried third-party file managers, and they hang, too.

Because of the AFP / Lion bug, I've been accessing the NAS via SMB. It's dreadfully slow, but in general it works... except when copying a lot (i.e. 50GB+) files.

Any ideas? The more I deal with this fiasco, the more disgusted I get with the ReadyNAS. I've been using storage products for decades, and I've never seen one with so many bizarre compatibility problems. ("Maybe it's the switch". "It's an OS problem", "The drive isn't on the HCL")

Sheesh. I just want to store and retrieve files reliably. Is that seriously a challenge for the gurus at Netgear?

NetGear can't do anything about how Apple designs its software. If you're not happy with the way Apple's designed iPhoto complain to them. It would be no different with a different NAS.

If you want to use AFP you should update to 4.1.8. It should be coming out of beta soon. AFP is a better choice for Mac users than SMB/CIFS.

Since you've upgraded to a new OS, but left your ReadyNAS on firmware released well before the new major OS update, it's not surprising you are having issues. Personally I would've recommended that if you didn't want to update to the beta ReadyNAS firmware you shouldn't have updated to Mac OS X Lion yet. Lion still has its issues and I've found 10.6.8 is much more stable at the moment.

If you're having a performance issue with any network equipment you're going to want to isolate what the cause of an issue is. Doing a direct-connection (http://sphardy.com/web/directconnect) can be used to eliminate a router/switch as a problem.

As for drives not on the compatibility list, they may or may not work. NetGear can't help it that consumer disks are designed for use in RAID arrays and thus disk manufacturers do things (e.g. introduce "green" features) that cause compatibility issues.

The NV+ is essentially pretty much the same as the NV released in February 2006. It's now entry-level hardware and demanding users should look to newer faster products.

The x86 ReadyNAS (e.g. NVX, Ultra, Pro) are far less picky as to what hardware they'll work with.

Agreed about the iPhoto issues - That's an Apple problem, not a NetGear one. But the fact that I can't copy files reliably from the SMB share IS a NetGear problem. A NAS is for file storage and retrieval. If it doesn't do that reliably, it's broken.

My ReadyNAS is running the latest released version of the firmware. Lion was in developer hands for months before the release - it's rather inexcusable that NetGear didn't have the compatibility issues worked out the day Lion shipped. (The beta version of the ReadyNAS software has all sorts of dire warnings about data loss, so I'm not comfortable trusting my data to it.)

And I'm not expecting tremendous speed from the NV+. But I am not tolerant of speeds 1/100th of what it used to provide.

For what it's worth, I use drives that are on the HCL. And the fact that later products are "far less picky" demonstrates to me that there is a serious problem with the ReadyNAS NV+, one that has not been fixed.

C'mon, Netgear. Fix the damn thing. Or replace it with something that works.