Author Topic: Does Linkstation Pro Duo really work with Gigabit network? Always 100 Mbps, even 1000 Mbps  (Read 31408 times)

Gargamel2003

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This NAS is not slower than other cheap NAS. I work two years now with this NAS and I'm really glad, that I bought this Link Station Pro Duo. It is worth every cent I paid for it.

I even coul upgrade it to 4 Terabyte without great effort.

I have transfer rates with the new harddisks up to 14 Megabyte/s  and this is more than enough for it's pupose.

The best thing is: Even if all PCs are off the LinkStation can backup my important data automatically to an external USB-Disk.

And I can use my data through the web interface all over the world. That's fantastic.

And now I read these statements from people, who don't know what an emarald they bought.

I can even print with my old USB-Laserprinter through the network without an own LAN-Function of this printer (Brother HL-5130).

 

So people: Don't cry too loud....it's shameful.

 

 


RoyalGreen

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Hi,

I have some sympathy for this issue; i bought a LinkStation Live. I didn’t expect it to transfer at even half the stated 1000mbps, and i appreciate there is little relation between the 1000mbps statement and actual speed.


Yet where I think Buffalo gets it wrong is by not stating what rate should be expected. Especially for the standard Live model, as all the other models like the pro state "High speed Data Transfer of up to 76MB/s" Which frankly is very high indeed and certainly sets the impression that the device is going to be much faster than it is in reality.


Personally i have gotten lucky and can transfer a 700MB file at around 17MB/s over my 1000mbps LAN... although I suppose my issue with Buffalo is when a company markets a product they have to manage their customers’ expectations. Unless you have had a prior experience with NAS drives in the past your expectations are high due to the 1000mbps rating and the "High speed Data Transfer of up to 76MB/s". When some users get around 4MB/s - 14MB/s its clearly missing the mark and leading to a shortfall in expectation on the device and a feeling of... well getting a substandard product. Ultimately it’s the Buffalo brand which loses credibility as devices get returned and people complain in forums and on intermediary websites like Amazon.


Finally having read  through the previous threads, I wonder if Buffalo have missed the point of this ill feeling towards their products (on the speed issue at least); it’s not about whether the public understands the difference between a NAS and file server it's down to misleading marketing material that raises expectations to a high level. I quote "High speed Data Transfer of up to 76MB/s"


To give it a slightly more conceptual analogy; It feels like the product was marketed as a Ferrari, potentially capable of doing 150mph, yet when you buy the car take it home and find it can only do 15mph and you speak to the sales person who says, “well that’s down to the 1.4lt (small engine) and it really does depend on the conditions of the road, and you do know the difference between x & y” you will feel short changed as you hadn’t expected to drive at 150mph, but you sure as heck expected it to perform a little better than 10% of its anticipated speed!


RoyalGreen

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Oh and i doubt this issue will get fixed as i suspect its' a shortfall in hardware performance. So little point nagging on that front. I also hate the fact i used the phrase "gotten lucky"... suppose it seems up where my expectations where at prior purchase and where they are now post...


pmolan

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I picked up a few sale items this black friday weekend.  A wireless N router (The one with the usb port to hook up external storage)  with gigabit ports and a western digital 2.0 terrabyte usb hard drive.  I thought I would clean up my buffalo a little bit this weekend and move things around since I just upgraded to gigabit.  I noticed a very small difference in performance from the NAS on the new router, which was the main reason why I skipped ober the 10/100.  I did however see a faster speed from the newer hard drive that I attaqched to the router.  This thread was started last year so maybe technology has advanced and things got a little faster since then.  Anyway, the reason that I am in this forum is because I was looking for this slow speed fix.  I guess I am not going to have any luck.


mikehunt42

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Why is this company still in business? I've just wasted 2 weeks of my life trying to get this product to work and when I search google for help all I see is hundreds of complaints from similarly deceived buyers about how slow these producst are. Everything about the Linkstation is slow  - the web interface is glacial at even loading basic data about the drive config and transfer speeds are just appalling to the extent that the product is unusable. I get really angry when I see comments from moderators suggesting that users need to tinker with esoteric network settings to make a pretty basic product function at even 10% of published transfer rates when it really should work straight out of the box. The manual is hopeless and the details so generalised that they barely apply to the individual model you may have. The direct USB-NAS stuff is obscure and lacks any kind of user interface to tell you if it's even transfering data or not, and the best I've acheieved by any means - including hard wired cat5 local network is a pathetic 200kbs which is as close to the square root of useless as it's possible to get. The whole 4gb device has been consigned to the trash can and I've just bought the same capacity in USB for under $100 which worked straight out of the box and gave me 30mb/sec transfers immediatly and which is shareable throughout my network - locally and remotely. I wish Google could capture this rant and make it instantly available to anyone even thinking about buying anything from Buffalo - in short, if you read this and haven't already been hooked in by the hype, DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME!


PCPiranha

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Theres no reason that you should be getting speeds that slow (200 kbs), there is most likely something else going on.  Let me know if you're interested in trying to fix the problem instead of being upset about it.


marfpilf

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I have seen the light...

The 127Mbps I was complaining about earlier is not a bottleneck of the NAS, I have a 2 or 3  year old LinkStation duo and one day I got frisky and bought a couple of upper-mid 7200 rpm drives with 64MB cache, chucked em into RAID 0 and BAM, now I get 215Mbps...

 

Keep in mind this is when READING a file from the LinkStation in RAID 1 and WRITING to a RAID 0 array via FTP.

 

Another thing to keep in mind.... this is as fast as it is going to get... Reading from mechanical HDDs can only be so fast :)

 


Retalliator

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Hi All,

 

As a former retailer-going-distributor in Germany and the Netherlands, I have been employed to see which products are being true to what they are offering consumers at-first-glance. We buy a couple of products and test them. If "issues" occur, we feel around the support side of the manufacturer. 

These Buffalo products appear not to deliver as promised. According to EU law it is unreasonable to expect lay-people to "do their homework" on each product they encounter. But getting into word-games and legal stuff... Nah, I'm not here to do that. That is more something for Neelie Smit-Kroes from the EU council (http://www.parlement.com/9291000/biof/01716?) whom I will be notifying of Buffalo's practices *in particular*.

As for us, we will not be taking on your products in our assortment, especially due to the support being delivered and the "no refunds" policy. This policy ONLY is in place because the division that has created these products are very well aware of the limited capabilities of these products. If Buffalo had *the tiniest bit of trust* in their own products, they would naturally offer a refund. 

For all people on here who have a complaint about the way the products are being marketed and the performance provided and think that it is misleading them, I would suggest contacting Ms. Smit-Kroes via her email: Neelie.Kroes@ec.europa.eu? so the designated deparments can start mining the web in regards to this sort of practices on the consumer side of the IT-market. 

The cause appears to be well known, even at the moderator level. The CPU is far too slow for a device which is supposed to be able to stream movie files over a LAN or the Firmware is not up to par. They know this. They are just reluctant to thell this to people. The CPU does not have to be a limiting factor in this sort of device: far superiour cpu's are cheaply and readily available all over the planet. which will deliver faster throughput for the same cost.

Either way, the products do not deliver the functionality they claim to possess: no-one will watch a movie stuttering or wait a whole night for a backup of a couple of files to be complete. If something is offered as a storage device and will only offer the illusion of performance when working on a small Word or PDF file on the network, than this is the device for you. For everyone else, I would suggest to take a look at some other products which might be slightly higher priced but which DO perform as one might expect. 

Good day to you all. 


wkweksl

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Just bought one of these and am playing around with it. One observation is that transfer rates are dependent on the routing speed of the gigabit switch/router you are connected to. On a Tp-link WR-1043ND, I was able to get 52MB/s read/write via the crystalmark2004 benchmark. Switching over to a Linksys SD2005 and subsequently a Belkin F5D8235v2, I was able to get 63MB/s and 74MB/s respectively. I had been previously adjusting jumbo frame sizes but they showed a decrease in performance as the frame sizes increased. I hope this might help those who are experiencing low transfer rates.

manifesto1969

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I know this is an old post but wanted to share my experience with this NAS.

 

I was getting slow transfer speeds of maximum 12MB/s with my original setup:

Pro Duo plug into my Router with 10/100 ethernet sockets

PC (gigbit card) plugged into Router

Cat 6 cable throughout.

Copying 12GB file from NAS to PC

 

My next setup which gave the same speed rates was:

Pro Duo plugged into a different router with 100/1000 (gigabit) ethernet sockets

PC (gigbit card) plugged into Router

Cat 6 cable throughout.

Copying 12GB file from NAS to PC

 

My next setup which works was:

Pro Duo plugged into gigabit switch

PC plugged into gigabit switch

Gigabit switch plugged into 100/1000 Router

Cat 6 cable throughout.

Copying 12GB file from NAS to PC

 

This setup gave me an average transfer rate 80MB/s. It topped out at 98MB/s and was no slower than 70MB/s   Result!

 

So my assessment is that if you plug anything into the router the hardware of the router will throttle your transfer rates from the NAS - buy a gigabit switch and watch it fly!

 

Buffalo could be a bit more helpful on their packaging to say what setup they had to get their transfer rates - but then I suspect they are worried that they would be held accountable if users use different hardware to them and don't get the same results - maybe!

 

The switch I used is:

 

Netgear Prosafe 8-port Gigabit Desktop switch - GS108UK v3 - you can pick it up at PC World on special offer for £39.99 as of today.

 

I really hope this helps.


sfnagle

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I have a 2 year old Linkstation. Finally had the time to figure out that my slow speed issue, of late anyway, was simply a mismatch between the MTU setting of the drive, and that of my MacBook ethernet card (card now set to 9000 and drive set to 7900 or so). I get rates of better than 40MB/s now (as measured by LittleSnitch network monitor).

 

This is for ethernet cable connected directly from MacBook to the drive because I've had issues with lost connection between my MacBook and the drive when I plug it into my router and then access wirelessly over my home wi-fi. I have not tried setting the two MTUs similar for wireless. Could be tricky unless the NIC changes the packet size automatically when interfacing with my ISP. The ISP may limit everything to 1500 MTU.