From the title you are thinking upgrade your router,nic,etc, but the set up a bit unique. I have a gigabit router and port on my desktop, but my WD Live has only a 100Mbit port. I have an old WD MyBook 350GB attached to a WD Live via USB2. This means I average 8-9MB/s over a wired or even wi-fi(using a Wireless Ethernet Bridge). I want to keep my WD Live, rather then upgrading to a newer WD Live Streaming unit or WD Hub, but I also want to increase transfer speeds. I had an old Seagate HDD I converted to an external for my Xbox360. I tried this enclosure connected to the WD Live via USB and via eSATA to my Kubuntu Desktop. No luck. The Live detected the HDD, but the desktop did not. I disconnected the USB2 cable, quick power cycle and my desktop picked up the HDD. So it seems the enclosure is meant to only use USB or eSATA but not both at the same time. I suspect the only way to accomplish faster transfers would be using a true NAS or a new WD MyBook Desktop NAS with USB and Gigabit port. However I really don't want to spend $100+ if I can avoid it. Plus the new MyBooks seem to be pretty questionable in terms of reliability for now. I think waiting for the next gen WD MyBooks may be a better idea. I looked for USB/Ethernet enclosures, but the only one I found with a gigabit port is almost $100, almsot the same price as the WD MyBook NAS, so for that price I could just upgrade to 1TB of storage. So anyways can any one think of a way to increase the transfer rates for a cheap price?
why don't you connect to both using usb? .. another thing (take this from a cluster builder) .. I don't find any advantage in above 100mbit ethernet.. cable latency and termination reflections tend to cause re-reads and ack bottlenecks unless the only network traffic going on is the data transfer.. to see any gain with multiple devices on that kind of network you need to set cable lengths as direct non multiples of transfer times.. (so learn to make your own cables reliably from the absolute top quality cables and connectors.. this means soldering on network cards because the sockets fitted are usually crap) otherwise the "bounce" can be as large as the signal causing many data errors and great latency (same as "ghosting" from termination bounce in RF cables).. Those have been my findings.. while you may see a speed increase with only one or two devices connected once you get up to above 32 network control traffic becomes a problem and wait states can become cumulative propagating through the network from the slowest device (longest cable) and eventually bringing it all to a standstill.. think of it like a self inflicted DDoS attack..
Well let me elaborate on the entire network set up: 1x Desktop 1x Laptop 1x XBox360 1x WD Live 1x Linksys E2000 using TomatoUSB Firmware Everything but the laptop is wired to the router, and traveling about 4 feet at most. I really find it hard to believe I would not see any major transfer speeds over a simple LAN set up like this. I am not quite sure what you mean here so I am going to answer as best as I can. I do not use USB because it would mean disconnecting the HDD from the 360 or WD Live and connecting to my tower. I currently can FTP everything to them at around 8-9MB/s average and even burst all the way to a full 10MB/s for short periods of time(say 5 seconds or so, more then a peak, so burst is the better term imo). 8-9MB/s average is acceptable, but not ideal. Secondly, a USB hub will not work in the case of the WD Live. It would work to connect multiple HDDs to the WD Live, but not connecting the external to the WD Live and desktop(or so I am told by the wd live firmware hacker gurus). Ideally USB2 speeds would be an improvement because I know the ancient MyBook has read speeds of about 50/60MB/s average. I forgot the write speeds but lets say I can get 25MB/s average write speed, that would be a more then acceptable jump in speed for me. The problem is maintaining more then 1 USB connection.
