So I bought this really cool Maxtor shared storage drive the other day and put it on my network… easily and beautifully. Then I started copying all of the music files from our main desktop computer to the new drive… it took three full days to transfer only 50GB of files (when we are done ripping all of our CDs, it should be closer to 250GB). I didn’t know why this was so, but I figured there must be some bottleneck in the “PC -> wireless card -> wireless router -> network hard drive” route.
When the copying was done, I loaded up iTunes on T’s laptop to try it out with the new drive. Hmmmm. Horrible skipping, slow file access, ugh. Crap, I just spent too much money on a network storage solution that’s slower than my old setup. I couldn’t figure out why this path:
PC -> wireless card -> wireless router -> wireless card -> laptop
could be faster than
network hard drive -> router -> wireless card -> laptop
So I immediately went to the net to do some research. Uh oh. It looked like that my Apple Airport Extreme was the bottleneck if used in mixed 802.11b/g mode. Crap. Our HP LaserJet 2100 is the only 802.11b device, but it is critical to our setup. Crap crap.
So, I switched the router to 802.11g only mode, and sure enough the music worked fine. Crap crap crap. I guess I’ll have to dump more cash on a new parallel print server that works on 802.11g directly.
So I switched back to mixed mode, and just for the heck of it tried again. Everything works fine. Everything. And the file access and transfers are much much faster than when I was transferring files originally.
And I have no idea why.
However, I suggest if you are having performance problems on your mixed mode network with your Apple Airport Extreme, switch it to 802.11g and then back again. It may improve your performance immensely!
