NAS plus Wi-Fi Spells Trouble

How time flies, about a year ago we undertook a large CD ripping project for a client, around 600 CDs into AIFF format. He is a teacher, which has nothing to do with the fact that he was planning to put all his music onto a NAS drive. Why a NAS? Mainly because he intended to buy a Sonos system and the NAS would enable him to access his digital music without having to leave his computer on. With young children he's prefer to be able to switch his computer off in the evening so his small children wouldn't be disturbed. He couldn't decide whether to go for a simple single drive NAS or a RAID based system. We decided the best thing to do would be to put his music onto basic USB hard drive, he could then copy that across to the NAS drive when he'd bought it. He rang at the beginning of the week. It's half term and his homework was to copy the music onto the NAS drive. I know its a long delayed project but he'd changed jobs, you know how time flies. Two days in and he was having problems. The NAS drive has a USB port and he'd hoped he'd be able to simply copy back from the USB drive into the NAS. That isn't a facility supported by this unit. Those I've looked at only allow the USB port to be used to copy off the NAS and onto a USB as a backup. I'm sure someone, somewhere, will add this feature but so far as I know not just yet. He'd found that out not just from the manual but by trying to make it work. So on Monday he connected everything up and started the process of copying the contents of the hard drive across. It was going badly. His USB drive was connected to his laptop, which connects wirelessly to his router, and that connects directly to his NAS via an ethernet cable. He felt confident the process would go smoothly as he has a swish router with the latest N level data transfer rate. By late Tuesday he was running out of patience. He'd been forced to abandon several copy runs (just seemed to hang with no observable progress), as the data transfer process got underway there were protests from kids and wife, the task seemed to kill the network. Worst the progress bar, when it moved, did so very slowly. He despaired that he'd actually get all the data across before the half term holiday was over. He rang for help. First thing to have in mind is the amount of data that needs to be transmitted. There's the music, plus the overhead of the many commands and acknowledgements that are built into any network operation. Wirelessly this is much slower than over ethernet, and there's the additional overhead of traffic conflicts, interference with the signal, bodies walking around. Massive data transfer over the airwaves are exceptionally slow. You really need to ditch the Wi-Fi and go with a bit of blue cable. As a rough guide I'd expect a wireless transfer of this amount of data would take around 150 hours. Yes, that's a lot of hours. Valuing domestic harmony, and seeing the horizon of the end of the holiday fast approaching he brought both drives over here and we did it across our network. I set it to run at about 18:30 and it was done before 09:00 the next morning. The first prediction from the progress bar was 14 hours but I think the final stop watch would have been short of that. We used an ancient Belkin router, if we'd done it across the new Apple router that's sat there waiting to be configured I'm sure it would have been faster.

NAS, USB and Wi-Fi

I’m putting up a longer entry on our Blogger site so I’ll be more concise here.

CD ripping can be slow, but nothing compared to the time it takes to get digital music files onto a NAS drive. So, if you’ve got a lot of music be prepared as it is likely to take many hours.

Remember that the published speed of your Wi-Fi was written by the marketing department, in real life data transfer rates are much, much slower. It simply isn’t worth the trouble to try to load a NAS drive over a wireless connection. Too slow, too prone to transmission breaks and you’ll be very unpopular with other network users who will think the internet has died.

Do it across ethernet cables connected to a router. Even consider buying a cheap router, it will save you many hours.

Fat 32 Shot in Foot

Typical, late Friday and I'm in a rush as we're off to have a meal with friends. Wanting to clear the decks the final task is to get some digital music from my production platform onto a USB drive for a client. We've done a lot of CD ripping this week so I had nearly 475 Gb of data on my system to be copied across to a USB drive ready to return to our client on Monday. Plug in USB drive, identify folder with clients music, drag and drop onto new USB drive. Shoot off for a curry. Into the hutch this morning, calamity. The folder had been copied but there was a window listing 150 error messages and sub-folders which hadn't been copied over. Tragically simple explanation - my production system runs Windows Vista and the drive is NTFS, which supports long file and folder names, This clients music is mainly classical so we have folder and track names derived from the artist. This is a combination of conductor, soloist and orchestra which generates lost of characters. The USB drive is formatted to FAT 32 with its limitation of much shorter file names. One way round this is to go into each errored folder find the long name then edit it down to a shorter name. This will work but it's hard to be certain you hit every single file. One mistake and you're facing a real mess. The better way to do it is use the Library / Consolidate command from within iTunes to first point from the 'old' NTFS location to the 'new' USB location and let iTunes do the hard work. Which is what the machine is doing now, it's why I am writing this (to remind me to be more careful next time), and why I wasted several hours of processing time last night.