I recently purchased an Air Live WMU-6500FS NAS device. You plug it into your network, and can access the files from it with Samba or FTP. (This drive can also perform downloads on its own without needing the computer to be turned on.)

My problem with it is that it seems to be reading and writing very slowly when accessed through Samba: it only seems to be doing about 2 megabytes per second. When accessed through FTP, it manages 4 Meg per second.

Trying to play video from the drive using my computer with Kaffeine results in freezing and stuttering - it usually doesn't get much further than a few seconds in before quitting.

Even though the measured speed isn't great, it should really be fast enough to play video. I tried playing video from the drive through my Xbox 1 with media center and it works great! So, why doesn't it work on my computer?

All devices are wired directly to the router; no wireless is being used. The router shows all connections are 100 megabit.

Have you tried mounting over CIFS rather than SMB? You will generally get a speed boost with CIFS, assuming it is supported server-side.

But I think the problem is elsewhere, actually. 2 MBps for Samba is brutal, but 4 MBps for FTP is just as bad. Since both Samba and FTP file transfers are so low, it would seem like it isn't actually a software-client issue, but is rather some networking issue (software or hardware).

Do you see any RX/TX errors in the output of ifconfig? If you try and ping flood the NAS (ping -f xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) do you get any lost packets?

Is CIFS a different protocol? The NAS only supports SMB and FTP.
I tried running ifconfig and it didn't indicate any errors, though from the description of what the command does I'm not sure it's what I need.

Flood pinging doesn't show any lost packets. Ping time is average of 0.372ms and maximum of 2.4ms.

I've just used Krusader to FTP a file from the NAS to my computer, then copied the same file from my Xbox to my computer, again using FTP. The Xbox is twice as fast at about 8MBps!

Seems to be a problem with the NAS itself.

Well, I guess that the device itself is just slow, since there doesn't seem to be any problem with FTP'ing to my Xbox. I'll e-mail OvisLink and ask if it really is supposed to be this slow!

However, since my Xbox can play files from the NAS but my computer can't, this means that it is, at least, fast enough to actually play media, but for some other reason Kaffeine won't play it. What way would people recommend to mount the device? I currently access it through the "Network Browsing" icon on my desktop, but I'll probably put an entry in fstab, and a direct icon on my desktop. Are there any settings I should make? I wonder if I need to set a buffer size or something, given the poor playback performance.

Also, what changes should I make to my firewall? ATM it won't work unless I turn off the firewall, but I'd like to just enable the Samba service. Instructions specific to SuSE 10 would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Okay, I've tried mounting this device as root and I can read files from it and they play fine. But for some reason I can't write to the device through SAMBA...

So, I tried adding the following line to my fstab:

//airlive_storage/Storage /media/samba smbfs noauto,user,rw 0 0

When I try and mount from the command line (mount /media/samba), however, I get asked for the password (there isn't one, so I just press return), and get the following message:

smbmnt must be installed suid root for direct user mounts (1000,1000)
smbmnt failed: 1

Not really sure what this means. Can somebody help?

I've used "chmod u+s /usr/bin/smbmnt" to change the permissions of smbmnt, but now when I try and mount the drive (mount /media/samba/), I get: "cannot mount on /media/samba: Operation not permitted". The samba directory, which I created myself as the mount point for the Samba drive, seems to have the same permissions as the usbdisk directory I've created and setup previously, so I'm not sure why this doesn't work.

Can anybody help me?

...can anybody help?