Extremely slow download from Itunes store when on NAS

Hi there,

I've exactly same problem. Only the "iTunes Media" folder is located on Synology NAS over Gigabit connection.

Thanks for your investigation, that actually the Download folder seems to be the problem. I think I'll try to work with an alias and point the Download folder back to a local one. Will give feedback later...

Downloads Alias: Fail. iTunes seems to only accept an alias for the "iTunes Media" folder, not for anything else inside there.

I have an external GoFlex 2TB drive that I have just connected wirelessly through my router last weekend. After transferring everything over to the GoFlex I noticed that any updates to songs such as titles, genre, year, album art...... takes long to update and sometimes even unresponsive. Never had this problem before the transfer to the GoFlex. My setup maybe a bit more basic then some that I have read here but it seems the slow down to the external drives are what we all have in common.

I haven't tried to download anything from the iTunes store yet. I'll post here when I do.

I hope apple fixes this.

at the end I went back to internal drive and synching my stuff now manually with the NAS, meaning I have redundand data now...I think I'll try it again with every new iTunes version.

have you also tried to attach the hard drive directly to your mac? Would be interesting to know if it also slows down or it only slows down when it goes over network components and protocols...

I have some information to add to this. I've been seeing these problems for quite some time since I started downloading in HD. My library is rather large so I too decided to use another drive. My case is different though I have and extra 2 TB internal drive and my media folder is on it. This rules out all Wifi, network, or USB bottlenecks as a cause of the problem. I have noted a few oddities about this behavior and I will mention them here although I am not sure what they mean.

1. If I set up a long list of downloads it seems to crawl on all downloads. If I kill the "apple push" process the top two seem to speed up. I have to maintain the list and only enable two downloads at a time to get anywhere near reasonble speeds but this method is great for one or two downloads at a time.

2. I was curious about this problem after watching it download for hours on a 24MBPS connection for just a few shows. When I did yet another search I finally found this thread so I thought checking something out might be interesting. I set up some HD movies to download on my secondary system that only has one hard drive. Although not at full speed they began downloading much faster. Three movies are all downloading on the single drive system faster than the one alone on the system with the Itunes media folder on a different drive.

Both systems are hard wired to the internet.

Finding this thread made me very curious I was wondering if there would be a performance boost if I uninstalled Itunes, and re-installed it on the media drive. I really wanted that drive to be storage only but it makes me wonder if it would give different results or the same problem from not being on the OS drive.

Both systems are running Windows 7, and both are able to download streaming content, large files, or movies from other sites relatively instantly.

Did anyone solve this? I have the same issue with my WD Mybook Live 2tb... I can at best get 1Mb/s on wireless and 2.5Mb/s on wired with a 120mbps connection and using 5ghz..

This worked for me. 54 hours for iTunes to download a 5.4GB HD movie to my WD 2TB MyBook NAS using wired ethernet turned into 27 minutes to download to my iMac HDD, plus 25 minutes to file transfer it over to the crappy WD NAS. Less than an hour total.

Something is SERIOUSLY BROKEN with how iTunes + OSX is moving data around.

Has anybody figured out a fix? This is ridiculous!!!!!!

In my case, the problem was the performance of the WD MyBook Live NAS, which was worse than terrible. I replaced it with an external USB drive connected to an always-on iMac, which manages the sharing. Problem solved.

My suggestion to people is to stay away from inexpensive NAS boxes unless all you use them for is email and/or small documents. They are not up to the job of media server.

NAS or not. I have an secondary drive. two drives actually, that are in a raid 0. Western Digital Black drives. When downloading from the iTunes store it only downloads around 15-20Mbps. I have a 50Mbps x 5Mbps Internet connection. When I change the location of the Media folder to my solid state drive which has the OS on it (Win 8) It will download at 50Mbps+. The problem isn't the hard drive or drives, nor the hard drive controller. It is the software iTunes. This is a fact and i can test this on many Windows 7 and 8 Machines. For instance i can download Steam games to my RAID 0 drives at full speed. When it comes to iTunes, its a no go. Figure it out iTunes!

Well, I'm experiencing the same problem and I'm far from having an inexpensive NAS. I'm connected to an 8gb fiber channel SAN and it's still ridiculously slow. If I set the media path back to its original position, it works just fine and downloads are fast. So, the only way I found to copy my movies to my external drive is to download them on my main hard drive, move them over to the SAN and change the path back to my SAN and then go to Files -> Library -> Organize Library, check Consolidate Files and hit OK.

Also, I want to point out that transferring files from my hard drive to my NAS from Finder is extremely fast. I can move the entire movie in less than 30 seconds. The connection to the SAN is not the issue.