Monday, May 12, 2008

Maplin Landisk Performance Fix Workaround



A few months ago I complained about the Samba performance and bugs in Maplin's Landisk (and other brands using the RDC2882 chipset) and how to fix the problems.
One problem, point 4 remained unresolved. Compared to about 20-30 MBytes/sec over direct USB, over a wifi network the Samba throughput I got in Vista was around 30-50 KBytes/sec and about 2-3 MBytes/sec over FTP. Whilst the FTP isn't great, it's certainly better.

The solution is to map a network drive to the FTP server on the landisk, however using Windows own network mapping tool you cannot execute/run a file in place over the network (e.g. double click the file), or add files to a play list like in Winamp. Instead you should install and use the free FTPDrive to do the mapping which can provide these features. There is still a downside, directory listing is slow compared to Samba, but it seems to be a reasonable tradeoff.

In all likelihood with the RDC2882 chipset being end of line, and the performance problem not already fixed in firmware, this is probably as good as you'll get :(

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