Lacie file move sluggish
I have two Lacie NAS drives that I use on my network at home. The drive is configured with two share points, and copying from one share point to another takes a very long time. I thought I'd open a dialog with Lacie to see what they thought. Here's a transcript of that conversation.
Posted: January 24, 2008 @ 12:00 AM
Moving files from one share to another on the same device is extremely slow. Several gigs can take over an hour to move. I would expect this sort of operation should only require the device to update the directory structure not perform an actual move of the data from one place to another. Can you suggest a shortcut method for doing this that doesn't require so much time (and bandwidth)?
Posted: January 25, 2008 @ 12:00 AM
[Me],
Thank you for contacting LaCie Technical Support. When you drag and drop files from one share to another, it actually copies the files from the first share to the second share. When reading and writing from the same network drive, the connection will be slower then if you were writing to the drive from your computer.
If you are transferring a lot of small files (lets say 10,000 files that is 10GB’s worth) with the same drive as someone else that is transferring a single 10GB file you will notice a very drastic difference in transfer rates and speeds. This is due to network overhead. The more files that are being transferred the more the overhead. This applies to all NAS devices.
Posted: January 25, 2008 @ 12:00 AM
Jeff,
Thank you for your response. I understand what you've explained. What I don't understand is why "it actually copes the files from the first share to the second share." The files themselves haven't changed, only their location on the file system has.
If I were to issue the "mv" command on an ext3 Linux file system, the command would be nearly instantaneous regardless of their location on a Samba share. Is there something I can do to improve the performance of the move since I know that both the source and the destination are on the same file system? My beer is getting flat waiting for this thing to do it's thing.
Thanks, [Me]
Posted: January 25, 2008 @ 12:00 AM
[Me],
You can try to copy and paste the files instead of dragging them from one share to another. Unfortunately we have no other options or suggestions.
Posted: January 25, 2008 @ 12:00 AM
Jeff,
Would you agree that this is an undesirable characteristic of the product? If so, may I suggest that an enhancement request be added calling for a correction to this behavior? I suspect that I'm not the only person experiencing this problem.
Thanks, [Me]
Posted: January 28, 2008 @ 12:00 AM
[Me],
I have forward your concerns to the product manager for review.
Posted: January 28, 2008 @ 12:00 AM
Jeff,
Thank you for all your help.
You might mention to your product manager that the reason I am even using more than one share is because I need two sets of permission on the drive. One share is read only and the other is read/write. If the drive supported file level permissions, then I would only need one share and the issue of moving the files from one share to the other would be moot.
Posted: January 29, 2008 @ 12:00 AM
[Me],
Thank you for the updated information. I will pass this information along.