The usb drive is a WD Passport 80gb.  Probably 2 or 3 years old now.  It's powered via USB.  I got the USB Y cable so it could draw off of 2 usb ports.  I also bought a dlink 7 usb powered hub to use for this so I wouldn't have to use 2 ports off of the laptop.  That just showed up so it's not connected yet.  The passport has a jack for an external power supply so maybe I should buy the proper power adapter for it or see if I have something lying around with the proper voltage/connector.  Hadn't thought of that.  The Toshiba laptop is 3-4 years old now.  (One reason why I'm being more diligent about backing it up these days!)

Thanks!

Just an update.  The darn thing is still going.  48 hours now.   Hopefully it will finish sometime today.  It's at 42.6 gb.  If I did the math right that's about 247kb/s and 14.8mb/min  Not sure if I have all the zeroes in the right place .  Not good.  Am gonna do some research on the WD web page to see what they say about this NAS drive.  What's interesting is that Ghost's progress/performance window says that it is 0% complete and that there are no operations running (so I can't adjust the performance slider).  Yet there is network traffic and I can see the backup file size change. 

I made the mistake of configuring the backup for high compression thinking that if the file was smaller that it would transfer quicker.  I am thinking that was wrong.  So that's part of the issue. 

Question:  since this is a drive image backup will it try to backup 80gb including empty space or just the 52gb of data.  Am guessing somewhere in between.  At high compression I would've expected it to be done at 42gb if it was just doing 52gb.  If it's doing the whole 80 gb then the ultimate file size is about 60% of that or about 48gb.  Is that right?  If so, there's hope that it will be done this evening when I get home.

Just to compare, today I just backed up (using Ghost 12) a data partition which is 144 gb in total size and 22gb used, from internal sata drive to external usb2 drive and it took about 15 minutes.  The resulting backup image file size is 13gb.

Try copying a 500mb or 1gb file using Windows Explorer, from your C: to the nas device and then again a different file from the E: usb2 drive to the nas device.  See what kind of performance and throughput you get.

Get normal throughput working first before moving to testing Ghost.

Search Google and other websites for info on NAS performance and throughput, as well as network throughput.  For example, tcp receive window size plays a big factor in XP relative to network throughput.

I'm not an expert at all on NAS devices, but they should work better (if that is really where the problem is) than you're experiencing.

Just because I know you care...I found this review.  I don't have the access problem he mentions though. The reviewer complains about its' slowness but I wish I could get mine going this fast.  Speed sounds closer to what I was experiencing not that long ago though.  I'd be happy with that.  I'd run the backups at night so it wouldn't bother me.   Reliability and consistency would be a big plus though!
....

Summary: I purchased this unit in order to run Windows backups to it.

It comes with a 1000BaseT (Gigabit) ethernet port and a USB port. However, the device can ONLY be accessed by a network connection.


The USB port is for adding an ADDITONAL USB hard drive, such as a WD Combo drive, or some such. (Which I have two of and unlike this product, they are great!)


Anyway, I plugged it in and immediately found that the ___mybook__ method of accessing the device did not work without generating errors. (___computer name_ is the universal method for accessing network file servers, which this "NAS" device is.) The errors I was getting were failures to write to the MyBook World Edition II.


After tinkering around with things, I discovered that if you use the IP address (___IP ADDRESS__) and MAP a drive letter to it, the problem goes away.


So I then ran my backups. I have a server on my network and decided to run a comparison test. I backed up my PC to the both the server and the MyBook World Edition II. Here are the results:


78 GigaBytes to the File server using Windows XP Backup:


80 Minutes


78 GigaBytes to the MyBook World Edition II, Win XP Bkup:


270 Minutes (!)

I understand.  At some point I might grab the trial ver of Ghost 14.  Looks like it will automatically create a backup on ext drive 1 and then copy backup files to NAS/another drive/offsite.  But you are right, I'll do some more throughput testing first.

Thanks for your patience.

Although I use Ghost for image backups of my operating system partition, I don't use it for data-partition backups.  I define Ghost backups as "independent" recovery points because then everything I need to recover is in that backup-image-file.  Others on this forum like the incremental backups, but I just like the simplicity of a full/complete/independent image backup all in one file.

Microsoft's free Synctoy as well as Replicator (www.karenware.com) and Goodsync (www.goodsync.com) and lots of others are good for data backups.  Plus when you see the backup file/folder, you actually SEE the backup file.  So you only need to update the backup with changes copies of your music, video, documents, etc. not the whole partition.