For years I couldn't open or stream anything from Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ to my laptop running MS Vista. Even opening a 2MB jpeg on the NAS would crash Vista's Windows Explorer. Copying down to the NAS was also iffy, but I eventually found a workaround using a wired connection I could drag and drop in Explorer only. Anything else crashed. I had run across articles about the problem on readynas.com forum, but I was never sufficiently motivated to fix it because the problem was only with my laptop and I could just use another computer to maintain content on the NAS.
Then I recently discovered that my laptop headphone amp is plenty strong enough to power my AKG K701 cans, which are 30ohm current hogs, and the laptop doesn't sound too bad. But streaming from the NAS stutters and makes dropouts. So that motivated me to fix it once and for all!
The troubleshooting articles on readynas.com offered advice, but it didn't help. But I found an article that did help.
http://home.bott.ca/webserver/?p=226My PPPoE DSL internet connection can only handle MTU=1492, so I had already reduced the laptop MTU to 1492, but that didn't help with the NAS. This article says lower the laptop way down to 1430 or 1460. I tried that, didn't help. But then later in the article it mentions that the NAS when set to MTU=1500 (default) uses fancy auto-negotiate algorithm to find fastest MTU when possible, and some older routers can't cope with that. I have an old modem/4 port switch/wireless router for my DSL connection. To defeat the auto negotiate algorithm on the NAS I set the MTU to 1492 and that fixed it. I could stream music, flip though pics, and download a WAV file of Holst's Saturn at about 2-3Mb/S on wireless. Problem solved!
Vista is designed to auto-negotiate MTU but is notoriously bad at it, and a few other things too...
So if you have networking problems with large files like music or videos, consider tweaking the MTU of your servers and or clients so that IP packets are the right size for every device on the network to be happy. If a packet exceeds the max comfortable size of a device's network interface then it has to be broken up into two parts to be transmitted, slowing or crashing the transfer. 1500 is standard MTU for wired ethernet, and usually the default on everything, but it doesn't always work in the real world. MTU should be set as large as possible while everything still works.
