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.