Performance and Conclusion

This Landisk has been fitted with a Maxtor 250GB IDE 7200RPM drive, formatted within the web admin interface and then loaded to around 50% with backup files. This connected to a 4 port router with built in wireless, and the access PC is also using a PCI wireless card to connect (at 54Mbps) and Windows Vista.

When copying large files (such as zip archives) across the Network, network transfer rates of 0.7Mbps are common. Copying lots of smaller files (in this example, 500 x <100k files) results in a slightly slower transfer speed.

Strangely, writing to the NAS drive resulted in transfer speeds of 2.2Mpbs. Again, copying several small files decreases the speed slightly as would be expected.

This does not seem to make any sense when compared to the performance of other NAS drives as normally the read speed should be slightly faster, not considerably slower. Accessing the network share from a Windows XP laptop provided similar results, indicating that the problem isn't down to Vista networking problems.

Network read transfers of under 1Mbps are too slow for this type of storage, and it appears that some other users have complained about the poor transfer performance and reliability on a users blog at icablog.org.

This article will be updated if the cause of the slow network speeds can be identified (or rectified via a firmware update). The USB transfer mode worked as expected and provided a decent transfer rate.

Conclusion

Although the Landisk initially looked like a promising hardware device, with a good looking and study enclosure, the performance of the unit is a real letdown. The features of this model work great, and it is only the slow read speeds that detract from the device - yet it is such a fundamental issue that it poses a real problem.

If the transfer speeds can be fixed via a firmware update then this would be a really good purchase. However in the current state it could not be recommended, unless you are using it primarily in USB transfer mode.