HOME NETWORK – NAS + ROUTER PROBLEM! – HP MEDIA VAULT A SOLUTION?

[mofei1]

I have two pc’s running nearby, and decided i would link them both via Ethernet wires to my router, so that they have stable broadband connections. This worked fine.

Then i decided that centralised NAS (network HDD) would be a good addition and bought a 250gb 10/100 freecom HDD.

This was ok, although slightly delayed loading of folders compared to normal internal hdd’s were a slight irritation. The drive would seem to ‘freeze’ however, when transferring more than 10gb or so, or when adding many gb of files to the WMP11 library.

Eventually i got fed up of the underperforming drive, as it wouldn’t allow me to transfer my large (100gb) document folders, or to even add my music collection to my library, so i decided to buy the HP media vault.

Upon setting the HP MV up, i transferred a 60gb folder from computer to HP MV via Ethernet. It is currently stuck, and has been for some time, roughly two thirds through this move, and is still reporting 71 mins remaining, as it has been for an hour or so.

The symptoms seem the SAME as with the freecom...

I am using a Netgear dg824m router, and was hoping that someone could help!!!

[I.M.O.G.]

What OS on the PCs?

[mofei1]

both systems are running xp sp2 with amd x2 4200 and 1gb ram

[Lotec25]

i would give this a try might help yea out.

Hook the comps together and give it a shot see what happens. I have noticed that some of those routers just cant handle that much stuff being transfered. I took my netgear/linksys routers out of the loop a while ago and i don't have this problem anymore.

When i first set up a server years ago i found that when i tried to move music files or movies over, it would hang and never complete. Had to keep opening and retrying. I ended up getting a Netgear FS516 and it took care of the transfer problems. Just seams for some reason those small routers fail a lot. I still have my netgear/linksys routers just not in my main loop.

[I.M.O.G.]

Thanks for the answer. I wanted to make sure Vista wasn't a variable first.

What NICs are in the machines, and what is the date on the NIC driver? I would like to confirm beyond a doubt you are on the latest version and there are no known issue with the driver software or just the hardware your running. Wired NICs can be dirt cheap and sometimes you get what they are worth.

Other than that, something I would do is go to the affected devices and manually set the link speed and duplex. For example, for my onboard NIC, I am currently set to autonegotiate - this means that depending on the link quality, my router and NIC will determine what the best link speed is to operate at (100Full, 100Half, 10Full, 10Half). If you have some bad cabling or its shielded poorly and getting interference, the link speed may decrease on the fly and that can cause the problem your seeing. Setting this manually forces the issue, and even if there are errors large transmissions may be more stable.

This is the setting I'm talking about, and you should find it in the properties of your NIC in device manager:

http://spamisyummy.googlepages.com/linkspeed.jpg

Edit: If you hook the devices directly together as mentioned above, that could help you determine if its the router or a NIC and could be useful. You will need a crossover cable or adapter to connect devices without a router or a hub inbetween.

[hkgonra]

Would connecting the pcs all on a gigabit switch , and then have one cable between the switch and the router in order to give the network dhcp addresses and internet access solve this problem as well ?

[I.M.O.G.]

Gigabit would increase the bandwidth, but this isnt a bandwidth problem. Its a performance/reliability issue and the problem would likely still exist.

If I had access to the network (want to give me remote control? lol) I would load wireshark and run a large transfer then analyze the capture to see whats happening on the wire when the transfer stalls out. Should make the issue a lot more obvious then. If you can run wireshark and save a capture of your connection freezing then upload it for us, that would do the trick too.

[mofei1]

Nic was set to auto negotiate, but was allowed to turn off to save power so unchecked that box

Tried moving 30gb from pc to media vault via router setup and was ok, then tried moving 20gb after and it failed 3 times consecutively. Please can you explain what I should do with wireshark and I will get that running ASAP.

Also, can anyone recommend a wireless router that could handle greater traffic, preferably with gigabit Ethernet sockets rather than my current 100mb.

Both pcs are currently running:
Ecs nforce3 939 mobo, standard driver – not updated

Router netgear dg824m wireless with wireless bridge for ps2 and hp network printer attached via wire

[I.M.O.G.]

Download and install the latest version of Wireshark confirming default options. During install WinPcap will automatically install also.

Post install launch the app, go to capture>interfaces then select options on the entry for your network interface. Under options at least specify a capture filename to save the output to. You can leave the rest of the options at default - it helps to specify a filter at this point if you know what your looking for, but for now you can just capture everything and we can do the filtering after the fact.

Once the options are set, make sure everything else that may use the network interface is shut down noise is minimized in the capture, then hit start. Start a large transfer after you hit start and let it run. Once it fails, stop the capture as soon as possible then we can analyze the end of the log to see what happened.

I've never done this with file transfers of this size, so its pretty likely that the capture is too large to be effective doing it this way. A better idea may be to start the transfer, wait until it stalls, start the capture and let it run for 30 seconds then stop, and look at what its trying to do while stalled. If we do that, we may miss the errors that are causing it to hang up though, not sure.

Give it a shot and see how it goes, I've had good luck with wireshark when analyzing a short snapshot of a transfer, but never tried it for a large transfer when I don't know when it will fail exactly.

[mofei1]

Nic was set to auto negotiate, but was allowed to turn off to save power so unchecked that box

Tried moving 30gb from pc to media vault via router setup and was ok, then tried moving 20gb after and it failed 3 times consecutively. Please can you explain what I should do with wireshark and I will get that running ASAP.

Also, can anyone recommend a wireless router that could handle greater traffic, preferably with gigabit Ethernet sockets rather than my current 100mb.

Both pcs are currently running:
Ecs nforce3 939 mobo, standard driver – not updated

Router netgear dg824m wireless with wireless bridge for ps2 and hp network printer attached via wire

[mofei1]

Having tried to run wireshark whilst the transfer ‘freezes’, I realized that I couldn’t save the resulting capture file, as nothing will open or close, and no access can be made to the HDD’s or My Computer once the file transfer has entered its frozen state.

I realized perhaps though, that the USB port may be a problem, rather than presuming the LAN connection/router was not up to scratch.

So, I changed the external HDD over to the other PC and tried sending the files from there, but faced the same problem.

I even tried plugging the external HDD into the media vault and running it as an extended network drive, copying between the two but the problem remained – it would still freeze!
I am about to order a netear gs605 5 port gigabit switch, so that I can get high speed transfers and access between all pcs and remain to have broadband also.
If there is anything I should know about this product or the setup process or ANYTHING at all, I would be very grateful once again for any help and info you may have.
This seems to be the only solution............would you agree?!
Cheers again