NASLite Network Attached Storage

It's taking about 5 hours to transfer a 7 GB file from windows xp machine to nas. Network is 100 throughout. No raid just four 250 GB drives.

Slow file transfers have many possible causes, you need to eliminate them one by one.

First you need to localise the problem - it can be the source PC (Windows XP), the network, or the destination PC (NAS).

You haven't told us very much about your network - is it a switched 100 megabit or are you using a shared media (hub based) network?

Depending on the actual conditions, switched networks are faster than shared media, especially as the number of hosts increases - with shared media, the entire network slows down as traffic increases, even when the traffic is not related to the two network hosts involved in the file transfer. A switched network effectively creates a direct link between the two hosts, so that other network traffic (within reason) does not have an impact.

A bad network cable, perhaps a miswired cable (crossed pairs) if your cables were custom installed and you have a long cable to the NAS box, down in the basement or out in the garage, could cause network errors, requiring retransmissions whic would definitely slow things down.

Turning attention to the source & destination PCs - fragmented disks, bad hardware or drivers (especially network cards), disks with bad sectors - and if it does turn out to be the NAS box - IRQ conflicts are all possible causes.

Do you have another Windows box on the network that you can copy the files to - preferably the second Windows box would be attached to the exact same network cable that the NAS box uses for this test.

A Windows to Windows transfer will completely eliminate the NAS from the equation, so that if the transfer is done at a reasonable speed, you would know that you need to look at the NAS box a little more closely - or - if the transfer runs at the same speed, you would know that the NAS box is not related to the problem, and that you need to look elsewhere.