BlackArmor NAS Network Storage Server

[stilfoto]

I just bought a BlackArmor NAS 220 as a replacement for my old LG NAS as I needed more space.

I'm a professional photographer and I want to use the NAS 220 as storage for my pictures - both raw files and edited pictures.

It took around 18 hours to copy 1 TB of data from my old LG NAS to the BlackArmor - and working with the files in Lightroom and Photoshop is a nightmare.

Browsing the files in Lightroom takes forever and when I click on a picture to look at it in hi-res it takes several minutes for Lightroom to display the hi-res preview.

I just tried to copy a single 24 mb raw file from the NAS 220 to my desktop - it took 3 min. and 45 seconds...!

I'm working on an iMac running SnowLeopard (10.6.4) and I've updated the firmware on the 220 to the latest version (2000.0631)

Anyone have any idea what to do or have I just wasted my money on this piece of hardware?

/Stefan

[afagolf]

It sounds to me like what you really wanted/needed is an external HDD, not a NAS. I'm not a Mac guy, so I do not know what facilities (ports) are available for external HDD expansion, but that is where I would start. For online editing, you really want the performance of an attached HDD.

[stilfoto]

No - I don't want/need an external harddrive. I want/need a NAS. First of all because the files need to be available from several workstations and second because of the extra security I get from the Raid.

And I've had a NAS before (LG) and it worked fine from both Mac's and PC's - and I never experienced any performance problems with that.

[afagolf]

what brand of router/switch do you use? the Seagate's do not play well with D-Link brand.

[arpagenx]

I had the SAME PROBLEM and SOLVED it.

The issue for me was my router. Crazy huh? Well to make a long story short, the firmware in the router caused it.  I was getting about 0.002 Mb/s transfer rates.

SOLUTION: Move the NAS and your LAN stations to a SWITCH such as the Netgear Gigabit Switch and plug the switch into the router. Now, I get over 20 MB/s transfer rates.

Thus, all network traffic between your PC and the NAS will never have to go through the router.  I meant to write a blog article about this, never got around to it.

I had to figure this out myself and explain how to do it to Seagate Tech Support.  Does that tell you anything?

[Jan&Sharon]

Use the new upgrade on firmware 4000-0671 see new post on forum above. Much better speed.

Regards

Jan

[stilfoto]

That firmware is for the 4xx series as far as I can see. I only have a 2xx...

[CyberMaxX]

stilfoto -

You never responded to afagolf's question "what brand of router are you using?" 

If you have a D-Link Router that your NAS is plugged into then there is a known compatibility issue with the Blackarmor NAS's and D-Link routers amongst the community here which causes herrendous speed problems.

I suggest following arpagenx's fix (above) that is, plugging everything into a network switch [Netgear works for me], plugging the switch into the router.  One thing at least - it keeps all the traffic that's local off the router.  I also posted another suggestion for those with D-Link Router/Blackarmor NAS Compatibility Issues here on the forum as well suggesting anyone savy enough could always try replacing the routers firmware with a good opensource one that is available, I suggested using dd-wrt.

Cheers.

[stilfoto]

I do indeed have a D-Link router, so that might be the problem (or have been, as I returned the box due to the bad performance).

Thanks for all your suggestions though :-)

[CyberMaxX]

Yes a number of people have posted about perfomance issues here on the forums while using D-Link Routers and that's what was probably causing your issue.  Sounds like a D-Link issue that needs to be addressed by them and not a Seagate Blackarmor NAS issue.

Personally I setup my internal network using a good switch and having that connected to the Router.  Yeah most routers have a few ports to connect devices directly to them but why flood the thing with data that's only for local network consumption besides good switches are fairly cheap now.

Cheers