Abysmal speed for TM backup on NAS

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Level 1

23 points

Abysmal speed for TM backup on NAS

I have tried a couple of times to connect a ICYBOX NAS to my MacPro with Snow leopard through a Belkin F5D8235-4 wifi router using Time Machine to backup my several internal HDs onto the two WD20EARS in the Icybox.

It started backing up, but the speed has been abysmal, after 10 days it had backed up around 1TB, around 1.2 MBps. Looking at the network window of Activity Monitor I see transfers are in bursts of around 4.3 MBps with an interval between bursts of around 3-4 seconds, while a second attempt today, after replacing all cables with known Cat5E ones I clocked 14 seconds between bursts.

Is this burst transfer behavior normal? What is the reason for it?

What should I check?

What can I try to improve the transfer speed?

I tried connecting the NAS to the MacPro directly, but I do not know how to let the Mac see it (how do I get its address, with the router I can see its address in the configuration page). Also, Can I use this connection on one of the Ethernet ports and have internet traffic on the other? How?

Thanks in advance for any help, although I am a first hour Mac users, networks are not my forte.

MacPro Quad 2.66, Mac OS X (10.6)

Posted on Jul 23, 2011 2:19 PM

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Answer 1

maurizm Author

Level 1

23 points

Jul 26, 2011 12:16 PM in response to maurizm

A little update. After fiddling around a bit I made it work on the second port, by configuring it when it was connected through the router to have DHCP on and a fixed IP address, and then moving it to the other port, and putting this second in the hierarchy so that internet goes on through the first port.

Transfers sped up a bit, something like double the previous speed, now it does 10GB in an hour, but this is still waaaaay less than it should. Any ideas on what can be wrong? Also, I have the impression that now all my web page connections have a sort of hiccup before loading (but it is true that there is this background copying going on, now)

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