Ghost 15.0 to NAS unusably slow

Howdy folks.  I've perused the forum and found topics that are nearly or exactly my situation, but so far none of the diagnoses or solutions seem to apply.

 

I have been running Ghost 12.0 for some years without issue or complaint.  Originally it backed up (both Recovery Point and File and Folder backups) a 180GB laptop hard drive to a USB Western Digital MyBook 500GB external drive.  As my needs have grown it has morphed into backing up a 500GB internal laptop harddrive to an Ethernet-connected NAS.  I noticed visibly slower performance when I switched from the USB external hard drive to the NAS, expectedly, and I was fine as I needed to share the NAS capacity with other machines that required backing up, USB was not an acceptable solution, and the performance was still acceptable.  However, in the intervening year the performance has deteriorated so noticeably as to render Ghost unusable.

 

I recently upgraded to Ghost 15.0 (trial version) to see if it would help, but it did not. 

 

Symptoms:

 

1) When opening Ghost (via the System Tray icon), I encounter a dialog window with a progress bar:

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Connecting and retrieving information from the backup and recovery service on BULLPC00

<green progress bar>

Reading backup destination information

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It is now taking between 10 and 20 minutes for this process to complete and show me the main Ghost window.  The average time is approximately 15 minutes.

 

2) File and Folder backups that are backing up less than 50MB of new files are running nearly two hours. 

 

3) Recovery Point backups enter the “comparison phase,” where the message that the volume is being compared to the last recovery point, and remains in this phase well over 24 hours.  The percent complete advances, but does so unevenly, and at a pace that if extrapolated linearly suggest that the comparison will run approximately 13 days.

 

4) I can no longer run recovery points as it is impossible for me to leave the laptop docked and connected to the LAN for this long a time.  (I have to go to work.)

 

5) Normal Windows-Explorer access to the NAS is quick.  A 170MB fie transferred from the PC to the NAS using a Windows Explorer copy in under 15 seconds.

 

Environment:

Computer

Microsoft® Windows Vista™ Business (64-bit) Version 6.0.6002 Service Pack 2 Build 6002

System Manufacturer     Dell Inc.  System Model   Precision M4400

System Type     x64-based PC

Processor         Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Extreme CPU X9100  @ 3.06GHz, 3067 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 2 Logical Processor(s)

BIOS Version/Date        Dell Inc. A19, 12/21/2009  Hardware Abstraction Layer       Version = "6.0.6002.18005"

Installed Physical Memory (RAM)           8.00 GB

Intel(R) 82567LM Gigabit Network Connection

 

NAS

Western Digital WDA4NC20000N 2TB ShareSpace NAS

Firmware Version  2.1.92 with MioNet 4.3.0.8 built on Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:00:00

Two (2) Western Digital 1TB disks running in spanned (non-RAID) mode

 

Network

Gigabit Ethernet LAN, anchored by a NETGEAR GS605 10/100/1000Mbps Desktop Switch

 

Any suggestions on where to begin troubleshooting this?  What pertinent additional information should I provide?

 

Regards,

 

Rob Bullard