I decided to try out this new device called a NDAS (no not an NAS) but an NDAS. Network Direct Attached Storage. Anyway it says it is the fastest method of transferring data. I have tried a direct connection through a gig lan and it transferred 35GB of info in an 8 hour period. I then hooked up an external hdd through esata and it did 35GB in less than 5 minutes. Can anyone explain what is happening? Am I doing something wrong? Also, this hdd runs at 52 idle in this enclosure and 35 in others.

A model # would help...

NDAS is apparently a proprietary solution by Ximeta; it's difficult to guess whats wrong with it.

Since it uses the network interface it is limited by its signaling rate, which is 1Gbps.

eSATA (3Gbps) is probably the fastest direct external connection for hard drives right now.

USB 3.0 (5Gbps) will be a little faster when that appears later this year.

Also although Ximeta claims it does not use TCP/IP and uses a special driver, which I am guessing is not based on NDIS, it still probably has its own encapsulation protocol and thus overhead.

If your using an onboard NIC, or LOM, this encapsulation will be limited by your cpu.

It then must be decapsulated by the NDAS device, wich will be limited by its cpu.

And then finally read or write to the disk, which would be limited by the actual hdd.

You'd probably be more successful with a SMB 2.0 network share.

BTW The fastest is probably Infiniband.