No problem. It appears that quite a lot of people arrive at this site because they have the same problem. If anyone else has a solution or can verify the one above please let us know.

Interestingly enough...for me a simple swap of patch cables (as mentioned in a previous post) resulted in a dramatic increase in response time.

Ok, i have a linkstation 300, just got it a couple of days ago. iam having a 'slow' problem but not quite the same as yours. it seems to take an age to connect first time, then after that its fine. if i leave it a while it takes an age again. odd? any ideas?

Interesting, mine is still slow as hell but connected over a 100baseT hub. i shall try it through my 100BaseT switch.

I can't even get mine to connect. Just keep getting a error of 'The network path was not found'. Checked the Buffalo site for any clues, tried the one option that was listed, but no luck. I can't understand as i can get into the utilities to set it up no problem.

THANK YOU for posting this! I've been trying to get the damn Link Station to work for days now! Their customer service is OH SO HELPFUL, after all....

Had my link station 250 yesterday. Setup ok on network. Got it connected into my netgear DG834G wireless router. However, when i got to transfer files from my PC to the linkstation it will only upload at a max speed on 2mb/s! Any ideas what settings are causing this issue. Im using WEP encryption, but surely that wouldnt make the transfer this slow. Help appreciated. Thanks

It seems that using an ethernet switch (instead of a hub) solved my problem. I have two LinkStation 250's that were dreadfully slow like you mentioned. Both connected through an Intel 10/100 hub. As soon as I replaced the hub with a Linksys switch that I had on hand, the problem immediately went away.

my buffalo linkstation is connected to a 1gbit switch from netgear. two other winxp stations and a router are also connected to the switch. after a while the speed between the winxp stations and the linkstation is going very slow. i changed the rj45 cable, i set fixed ip addresses, i don't know what i should do now... plz help

I have a 300Gb Buffalo, which was running at what I thought was a slow transfer rate, so I swapped to a different RJ45 cable as suggested here, and tested with a bandwidth monitor. I was seeing 6.5Mb/s peaks and a 400Mb took just 2 minutes to transfer. I then thought maybe it wasn't the cable and tested again. 7.5Mb/s with the originaly cable and slightly under 2 minutes for the file transfer from Buff to laptop...similar figures obtained for the reverse What should I expect over a 100Mb wired network from this device? db

My linkstation 250 had become very slow took 10 secs to connect via browser and 250mg files took up to 1hr to transfer. Realised this had happened since a I disconnected the printer to check ink levels. I disabled the print server and performance improved. After re-enabling printer I had to clear the print queue to keep good performance

Problem solved: Seems as reset disabled print server, but did not empty print cache. I did it manually ("Clear Printer Job Queue") and voila! ~50Mb/s again.

I got a 25gb linkstation yesterday and i have had no end of problems. I ended up trying to run the scan on the drive which they say takes a few mins to a couple of hours - well 13hrs on i gave up. It was also flashing as harddisk full even though there is only 9gb of data. Full thing is copy files fine, try make a folder and it crashes and must be rebooted. At end of tether lol.

I can confirm that for me the problem was both the cable included in the box, and attempting to transfer over 54Mbps Wifi. Using wireless and the included cable, a 600MB transfer took 17+ minutes. Using Wireless and a "proper" cable the same transfer took 7 minutes. Using a completely wired route (no Wifi) the same transfer took 2 minutes.

Thanks to you all for your hints and suggestions. I've been using the 300GB LinkStation for a couple of months now and today I was on the verge of chucking the thing in the bin. The Buffalo support people are no help and lost interest once the basic functionality was established as working, even though the response times where ridiculously slow. I'm running a TCP/IP network with a number of different operating systems. The backbone of the system is running at 1GB, which is what the LinkStation was plugged into. Like other people, the problems I had with the connection to the device started as soon as you tried to map it to a Windows Box. XP, Win2000 Server or Win2003 server all demonstrated the same problems; very slow to map the drive initially and very slow transfer rates. There was a notable and serious degradation of network performance from any machine that had the drive mapped. Today however, I've changed the Ethernet cable to a proper Cat5e patch lead instead of the silly flat-strap rubbish supplied, I've moved the drive out of the COMMS room and sat it next to my desk where there are no other electrical disturbances. I've switched off the internal print server, which made an instant improvement in response times to the web interface, and I've got the thing plugged into a cheep Linksys 1G router rather then the £2,500 worth of 3Com core switch that it was plugged into before. The difference is about a 4 fold increase in speed. Random access speeds where testing out to around 6MBytes a second and are now up to 22Mb a second. The drive maps almost instantly now and there is no longer a problem with the servers forgetting the things there. As it stands, time will tell if the device will maintain it's reliability. At the moment the device is performing well, but there are obviously a couple of design issues with the device that buffalo should sort out for the next generation of these units. I certainly wouldn't recommend anyone else buy these and would point to Lacie for a more reliable alternative.

I was getting really worried about my slow transfer times. After reading the above post I did the following. Enabled and disabled print server, cleared print server cache. Disabled FTP. Replaced supplied network patch cable with CAT6 one. Moved Terastation to same switch and my computer. So far so good. Transfer of DVD files gone from 222 minutes to 4 minutes. I suspect that the real issue was the switch built into my ADSL/Router. I moved the tarastation and my computer to a seperate 100MB Dlink router.

Had same problem, too. Now I just disabled print server and it works great. Thanks a lot :-))

Turned off the Print Server and noticed network utilization going from <1% to around 10%. However, is 10% utilzation of the network acceptable? I would figure this be higher?

I dont have any problems with file access.... but printing is dire. From my MAC its not too bad. From my Windows XP PC its slow From my Vista PC... well lets just say I gave up waiting. Printing from Adobe apps (which I do a lot) seems particularly bad. Buffalo gave me a workaround to let Vista access the drive (even that didnt work at first) due a default Vista security policy. At this stage Im thinking of plugging my Epson back into the USB port of my PC :(

Hi, I've had the Buffalo HDHG-300 for about a year. I'd had the same problems and had given up as Buffalo support was non-existant. I found this thread today, and it's rekindled my hope for a solution. I have 2 XP boxes with giganet, a D-Link giganet switch, and an ADSL2 router (100base). No matter what combination I've tried I've only ever got 5Mb/sec W, 7Mb/sec R, (except for just an XP box directly to the LS which got about 9.5Mb/sec W, 12Mb/sec R). I have 'FTP' enabled, and 'Jumbo Framesize' selected. I've also other cables and 10/100 routers. I've just switched off all the USB options and flushed the printer cash - which and this has gained me an extra 1Mb/sec R & W, which is still painfully slow. Any advice would be appreciated. :-) Sarah

I have Cat5e cable as well as the Buffalo cable, both tested with similar results. Ping tests to the LS Pro were below subsecond with 32K packets. Reading/transferring a 453MB file from LS Pro to my laptop took about 30-32 seconds, with an extra 5 seconds when writing to back the device. Not sure how to speed that up, may have to do for now... HTH

Disable the printer, clean printer queue and all the problems go away :-) Thank you for the advise guys!

Hey there... Issues here as well, with continuous hangs of my LS-300. I would like to try turning down the print server but cannot find this option in my configuration utility. Can anyone tell me if and where this option is available on the LS-300? thx!

FROM BUFFALO TECHNICAL SUPPORT: ================================== The transfer speeds you are seeing are right about where they should be, if not a bit high, for a gigabit linkstation. The limiting factor is not the network card, but rather the processor and ram speed in the device itself.

Hello guys. I bought the 500 Gb Linkstation Live here in the UK for £159 from Staples. A bargain. But it's too slow. Here are my measurements. First with 100 Mbit/s networking:

5 Mbyte/s is the speed for drag and drop copying.

With FTP that speed increases to 8 Mbyte/s for a single large file, the average is less for many smaller files.

With gigabit Networking I got 12 Myte/sec (drag and drop) and 15 Mbyte/s with FTP.

For us Linux guys, it is even slower if you copy the data accross an SMB mount (ie. access the samba share through a mount point. I did this so I could script the backups). Forget NFS. It's not supported.

This device is a huge disappointment. It's just too slow for backups. The box says ("as fast as USB 2.0 !"). My external 80 Gb disk, actually an Archos AV380 media player (an excellent item) achieves 20 Mbyte/s drag and drop, and that's a 2.5" disk several years old. A modern 3.5" disk would be even faster I am sure.

Other gripes: the web interface is slow and of disappointing quality. The page loading time is 5 or 10 seconds, and over 30 seconds if you change a setting. Sometimes the Linkstation is visible on my network, sometimes it is not (not necessarily the Linkstation's fault). There can be permissions issues (at the moment, I can't rename a file on the Linkstation).

On balance, I don't know why anybody in their right mind would buy a NAS. Buy an external USB disk and carry it from PC to PC if necessary. Fast, no issues with networking or permissions and no flaky web interface to absorb hours of your time

.

Ok so the problem with the Gigabit switch/router thing is that inside the LS is a 100Mb NIC card. You cannot just hook up a Gigabit switch and expect it to work. What I am wondering is if there is a way to replace the NIC with a faster one. Will get back with results.

Excellent post, very useful. Having the same problem where the Linkstation 250GB would start copying a file then so much through it would stop. Like as if the Linkstation was restarting, it would continuously do this. Pressing the power button made no difference. Decides to wake up at some point. Disabled the print server which I have never used and guess what problem solved. Bizarre. The weird thing is I have had this unit for 3 years and it only started playing up today!

I tried all of the above and was really getting frustrated at my 2KB/s speeds. Here's what worked, I grabbed a paperclip and pressed the small reset button at the back of the unit (wait until the units beeps); now I'm getting "normal" speeds!

My setup is as follows, as much info as I can think of: - Orange Livebox router connected to desktop (winXP) integrated nic [with router suppled cable] - 500gb linkstation live connected to router [with flat cable supplied] - hp 970cxi printer connected via usb to LS (print server enabled). All 4 units sat next to each on desk. Web Access enabled on LS (although when previously disabled made no difference), FTP&Apple disabled. Main transfers are to&from a laptop (wireless G) with Vista Home Premium, using simple drag&drop in explorer. Currently getting approx 2mb/s when transferring files - painfully slow! If laptop is connected to LS directly with flat cable then speed increases to approx 8mb/s. After reading these posts I tried disabling print server but didn't make a difference (although didn't restart LS!?). Am going to buy CAT6 cable to connect LS>router and desktop>router. Once I try this i'll post results to hopefully help others and/or get other ideas if it doesn't work. A.M.

I previously switched my NIC in my computer to run at half-duplex instead of Auto per a suggestion on another forum. This helped for about a day. Next day, on a large upload to my LS, network utilization was at around 1/2 of 1 percent. It ran for hours like this. During the upload, I logged in, cleared my print cache (per suggestions on this forum) and utilization jumped up to 10%. Then I disabled the print served (also per this forum) and utilization is now bouncing between 50% and 60%. Thanks a lot for all of your suggestions everyone!!

Hello, I switched my NIC from full-duplex to half-duplex and MIRACLE it works fine !!!

Following on from my last post (22 December 2007 12:44:22 GMT) and in reply to post "22 December 2007 13:45:20 GMT". I've not had any noticeable results when messing around with various settings. The CAT6 cable hasn't made much difference. Max speed I get is approximately 8mb/s, which is 64% utilisation to my calculation. This is when I connected the LS to my desktop (NIC stated gigabit connection enabled). So as it stands, I've stopped trying to figure out how to make it any faster. I do realise that the max would be 12.5 mb/s, but I can't understand why it would be as slow as 2mb/s!!! A.M.

HA, I just mentioned that my problems were fixed, then did a very fast TimeMachine backup, then decided to copy a movie to it, and... boom, back to 3 MB/s. The web UI is so slow I can't even login to change any settings... Piece of junk.

Hi, I've got a Linkstation Live 500GB with an attached USB Drivestation 500GB and I'm also seeing the same thing... the usbdisk1 folder in descending folders, in my case going down to 24 levels deep! Haven't been able to find out and details on the net so was wondering if you've had any luck?

I've had a 400G one of these for a while after being given it because 'it keeps locking up and needing reseting because it drops off the network' Well I have it working perfectly, and here's what I did:
- Upgrade the firmware to the latest version.
- Set a Static IP address - do not use DHCP
- Connect it to a Switch and NOT A HUB. (Hubs send all traffic to all ports, where a switch will direct it only to the required port, meaning a 100M switch has an effective throughput MANY times greater than a 100M Hub) - if your PC has gigabit, then use a gigabit (1000M) switch
- Use a good quality Cat5e patch cable. (I use Blackbox cables)
- Do NOT use the BUffalo software. It is unnecessary. Just either map a drive or use a UNC path.

Finally remember that the transfer speed is limited by several factors:
- The slowest part of the network - If you are using a wireless connection this will be the limiting factor, and it is highly unlikely you will get anywhere near rated wireless speed.
- The speed at which data can be read from the source drive (PC or linkstation)
- The speed at which data can be written to the destination drive (PC or Linkstation) which will always be slower than read speed.

Hope this helps.