Fastest way to transfer files on home network

[aerodynamic750]

Hi all, hope you can help me

I want to transfer 5 folders each containing about 100GB of data from one NAS drive on my home network to another NAS on the same home network, and I can’t figure out the fastest way to do this and I wondered if someone could advise me please.

Here’s how my home network is set up: The router is a Netgear DGND4000.

I have two Western Digital My Cloud NAS drives connected to the router via Gigabit Ethernet. I want to copy the folders from one NAS to the other but it is so slow.

I have to connect my laptop to the network either wirelessly or by using a USB2 to Gigabit Ethernet adapter and start the copying process between the NAS drives using Windows Explorer in Windows 10.

Doing it like this the transfer speed of the files between the two NAS drives is only around 5mb/s

So I tried a different way to get the folders on to the NAS too as follows: I also have the folders in question on a portable USB3 HDD so I connected the USB3 HDD directly to the USB3 slot on the back of the NAS and used my laptop (set up as described above) to transfer the files from the USB3 HDD directly to the NAS. This still only achieved a transfer speed of around 5mb/s!!

I wanted to try copying the folders to the HDD of my laptop and then from there to the NAS but the HDD on my laptop isn’t big enough to store them temporarily for the transfer.

Can anyone suggest the fastest way for me to get these large folders copied over to my NAS, either from the other NAS or from the USB3 portable HDD please?

Would a USB3 to Gigabit Ethernet adapter for my laptop improve speeds compared with my current USB2 to Gigabit Ethernet adapter, or isn’t this the problem in this situation?

Many thanks Gary

 

[Geoff]

Do your NAS drives have a web interface that you can access? I would look at transferring them directly from one NAS to another, rather than from one NAS to your laptop, then to the second NAS. With gigabit ethernet you should be able to transfer directly at up to ~100MB/s

 

[beers]

What kind of data is it? If you have a crap load of small files then it will impact your transfer rate.

Also, USB 2 doesn't have enough bandwidth for gigabit and is also half duplex. I definitely wouldn't use wireless for larger transfers unless you were going to do something else in the interim

 

[aerodynamic750]

Thanks both
Geoff, does it matter if there's no web interface? Why am I not getting 100mb/s when copying the files via windows explorer if both NAS drives are connected to the router via gigabit Ethernet? What's the benefit of a web interface please?

Beers, it's a mixture of data, photos, videos, text documents. Some of the videos are large HD videos captured on my GoPro camera.

Will a USB3 to Gigabit Ethernet adapter be better than a USB2 to Gigabit Ethernet adapter? That's the only alternative I have to connecting my laptop via wireless.

Thanks, and sorry if my questions sound a bit thick.

 

[Geoff]

The reason you aren't getting full speed is because you are using your laptop to pull data from one network device, and push it to another network device. The bottlenecks you have now are a more congested network connection due to pushing and pulling data at the same time, and your laptop needs to download and store that data before it pushes it to the second network device, which if it's an old laptop, likely has a very slow hard drive.

If you are doing this over wireless, you can forget about doing it this way. Wireless is half duplex, so when you are trying to push and pull data simultaneously you are drastically reducing performance.

 

[aerodynamic750]

Thanks Geoff. I can't figure out how to transfer the files directly by web interface. The best I've been able to manage is by using a newly acquired USB3 to Gigabit Ethernet adapter to connect my laptop directly to the router and then transferring the files between the NAS drives in Windows Explorer, doing it this way fluctuates between 20mb/s and 40mb/s. Does the physical length of the Ethernet cable between my laptop and router make a difference to transfer speed? I'm using the Ethernet cable which feeds my TV and it goes the whole length around my house so is about 30 metres long. Would a shorter cable speed things up? Thanks for all your help.

 

[Geoff]

Thanks Geoff. I can't figure out how to transfer the files directly by web interface. The best I've been able to manage is by using a newly acquired USB3 to Gigabit Ethernet adapter to connect my laptop directly to the router and then transferring the files between the NAS drives in Windows Explorer, doing it this way fluctuates between 20mb/s and 40mb/s. Does the physical length of the Ethernet cable between my laptop and router make a difference to transfer speed? I'm using the Ethernet cable which feeds my TV and it goes the whole length around my house so is about 30 metres long. Would a shorter cable speed things up? Thanks for all your help.

30m is below the 100m limit, so as long as it's CAT 5e/6, a different cable won't help.

 

[aerodynamic750]

Thank you

 

[neel143890]

What amount of information do you have? When you've made sense of it presumably would have been quicker replicating instantly

The other alternative is to dismantle the hard drive and connect it to the SATA port on your mobo, however you'll void your guarantee, and it's somewhat more work. 1TB of information (Assuming it's full) at 30MB/s won't take you too long.

 

[Geoff]

What amount of information do you have? When you've made sense of it presumably would have been quicker replicating instantly

The other alternative is to dismantle the hard drive and connect it to the SATA port on your mobo, however you'll void your guarantee, and it's somewhat more work. 1TB of information (Assuming it's full) at 30MB/s won't take you too long.

Assuming it's not part of a RAID, and what file system the drive is in.