Transfer FROM external drive usb/esata TO RN102 ?

You can connect any disk you want to any port you want as long that the disk is in a known format to the NAS.
The tech sheet says EXT3, EXT4, NTFS, FAT32, HFS+ are supported by default.
IS your drive in Exfat or any unlisted format ?
Is your RN102 in 6.1.5 (this version is known to have USB problems) ?

The transfers are really slow, internal drives should be connected at least at 3gbit/s (SATA II), 6gbit/s (SATA III) if you have a recent computer. Normal HDD should be able to read at 100Mbyte/s easily. My RN104 handles 40-50Mbytes/s in write no matter the source. Even with a 100Mbit/s network you should still have 11-12MBytes/s

It's a 1.5 terabyte drive formatted in ntfs on a Windows 8 desktop. My internal drives are configured in bios as sata III. Not sure if that translates through Esata ports. Is there a way to test transfer speeds from my Esata drive to my ssd internal? Perhaps that will help determine if the issue is desktop, network, or nas related.

nop e-SATA ≠ SATA but E-SATA should provide 3gbit/s, usb2 should be 480Mbit/s if my memory doesn't fail me.
The simplest way I know to test the speed is to copy something large for a few seconds and checkout what windows says about the speed (small file tend to be hard to copy/read for HDD and have slower transfer rates). I believe win8 has the same drop down arrow than windows server 2012 which shows a graph with the speed. You will have real speed, not theorical speed which you can find on you motherboard manual and about which we don't care anyway.

What bothers me is that the NAS didn't recognize your drive, it should have if we look at the NAS tech sheet, it recognized my HFS+ drive when I plugged it in the first time I booted my NAS. Except of course if you have 6.1.5, then the USB front port should be the only one to work.

This might help you. How I transferred/restored my NAS from an external HD.

FYI: Transfer speeds on my old Sparc nas from external to internal over USB2.0 are painfully slow.

OK. Slow response on my part. I was on v6.1.5. I upgraded to 6.1.6 rc10. Now when I connect my drive through the esata port I get an error stating "external storage ..drive name... filesystem not recognized". I reconnected the drive through the esata port to my now windows 8.1 pc and confirmed it is a NTFS format.

Also a different question. I have successfully SSH'd into my nas. What path will the external drive show under once it's recognized?

By default the NAS will use /media to mount the drives and create a subdirectory for each partition on the drive.
Can you run a check disk on your disk and eject it properly from windows ?

Here are the chkdsk results below. Trying eject now. Will post results.

Windows has scanned the file system and found no problems.
No further action is required.

1465136000 KB total disk space.
880465952 KB in 157360 files.
71540 KB in 24229 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
342428 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
584256080 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
366284000 total allocation units on disk.
146064020 allocation units available on disk.

xeltros!!!! You rock :P)

OK. Can see through remote admin as well as through SSH: /media/ESATA_HDD_1#.

Next question. To move the data over, what is the difference between a cp command at SSH and a rsync? Is one or the other safer or faster?

Both are fine. cp is the native linux copy command; it is probably faster.

sent 189.79G bytes received 1.16K bytes 19.79M bytes/sec
total size is 262.13G speedup is 1.38

That's my speed through the directly connected esata port using a rsync command in SSH. So that's almost 20 megs per second correct? Shouldn't that be faster?