fregley said: I recently purchased a Dockstar and so far I am unimpressed. Accessing my hard drive over LAN using the Drive application provides less than 50 KBps download speed! Accessing the drive using the online access provides a better 200 kbps, which is only slightly less terrible. Attempting to stream an mp3 is painful. I've searched the forum and seem unable to find a solution. What can I do to improve these terrible download speeds? Am I simply stuck with them?

Fregley,

What is the nature of the USB drive you hooked to the Pogoplug device?

Also, I've tried streaming mp3 files from drives, not just pogoplug, but other sources on my local LAN, and my conclusion is that streaming gets flakey when going to an iPhone on 3G.

Streaming seems to work better going to another computer out on the public network.

To solve the streaming to my iPhone, I simply converted all the Mp3 files I wanted to stream to the iPhone into a directory I call "96KbFM" -- since 96 Kbps is often defined as "FM quality" and it sounds great.  I keep the original 320 Kbps in case I want to edit, or make a CD but the 96 Kbps is the solution I found for streaming music to my iPhone.

Back to your slow pogoplug speeds -- read my other comment, and report back on the nature of your USB device  (hard disk, usb thumbdrive, etc)  and how it's formatted.

My slow USB thumbdrive is DOS formatted, FAT32, and my Seagate Flex is NTFS and plugged directly into one of the two ports on the Seagate Flex Net device.

Jeff

fregley said: The hard drive I have plugged into the Dockstar is a 1TB, externally powered NTFS drive. It is simply plugged into one of the dockstar's 3 USB ports. I have nothing else connected save for the ethernet cable and the power supply. I do not understand why my transfer speeds are so low. What speeds do you typically get over LAN and over internet? Incidentally, when I access the drive in Ubuntu using the Disk application, my speeds equal the ~200 KBps I achieve when using the web interface. Is the client for Win7 64-bit particularly buggy or something of that nature?

Hi Fregley

The speed I'm seeing is typical of what I get on other NAS storage I have in my network. The speed to the USB Flash drive was very slow, but to a regular hard drive, it's fast.

There might be an issue with the 64-bit client, I don't run a 64-bit OS but my brother does so I'll test his when I can.

I formatted an external drive with MacBook journeled OS X format, and it's fast on the USB port.

I'd be wondering about the 64-bit network driver too, it doesn't sound like it's working as it should.

But I don't have an answer for you about fixing it.

x-15a2 said:

fregley said: I recently purchased a Dockstar and so far I am unimpressed. Accessing my hard drive over LAN using the Drive application provides less than 50 KBps download speed! Accessing the drive using the online access provides a better 200 kbps, which is only slightly less terrible. Attempting to stream an mp3 is painful. I've searched the forum and seem unable to find a solution. What can I do to improve these terrible download speeds? Am I simply stuck with them?

Since you have the Dockstar, have you tried using WFS instead of the drive application? You should find this to be much faster. Of course, it only works across your LAN, not across WAN.

Good point. I setup WFS (Windows file Sharing) and set the workgroup name and forgot about it.  I use the P: drive approach and haven't noticed a slowdown.

I could use the network share name, but havent tried that yet except to see it there, and of course is shows up whether or not the pogoplug drive app is running.

fregley said: Thanks a lot! WFS speeds are what I was hoping for! I haven't tested the Drive app over the internet, but LAN was my highest priority. Thanks again!

When you use the Drive App, your own drives on your network are accessed directly, not through the internet. File transfers stay withink the LAN, however the details about the drive contents gets updated and it may take some time to finish if you move a lot of files to the LAN drive.

I may be misreading your comment, but it seems you are saying that the Drive app will force file transfers over the external internet to a drive on your local LAN. That hasn't been my experiece.

The WFS setting simply allows the drive to be known to the LAN brower function so it can be accessed without using the P: drive approach.  But the P: drive access to your local drive is just like accessing the WFS name and once the connection is made, Windows uses a file handle, not a name, to identify the device once a "file open" or transfer is started. At that point, it's all about file handles, much like URLs are translated into IP addresses, which are really the basis for being "connected" to a URL. The URL requires conversion to an IP address, the IP address is there directly, but after the looup, either one should behave the same in terms of speed.