Referenced files on RAID NAS via wireless = SLOW

Question

I've done some searching here to see if this question has come up before and I didn't find much. Here's the situation: I have all of my photographs on an external network attached storage (NAS) device running X-RAID (proprietary version of RAID 5 essentially), accessing it via the built-in wireless in my Macbook Pro, and when I import photographs from the device into Aperture, I make sure they are set to be referenced. All is well and good at this point.
The problem is that when I try to browse the images after they have been imported, Aperture seems to take forever to load just one image... literally on the order of 30 seconds or more per image! This is incredible, since the speed of the wireless is 54mbit. The files I am working with are around 12 MB each, so even 2 MB / sec, it should take maximum 6 seconds to load an image.
I confirmed that the wireless is definitely not the problem here by dragging and dropping a file from one of my collections using the Finder. Total time is about 3 seconds from the RAID to my desktop, and the Network page in Activity Monitor confirms the surge of network flow across the wireless. Back in Aperture land, it literally crawls along at a snails pace of around 400 - 500 K/s until the image finally loads and the Loading circle goes away.
Anybody know if there's anything that can be done to speed up Aperture? Doesn't seem like it from what I can see on the preferences page. sigh - this is really starting to annoy me, all these little problems with Aperture. It's definitely not turning out to be the be-all-end-all photo management solution I was hoping it would be.
p.s... I completely disabled preview generation and erased all the previews from my library. No projects cause previews to be generated now.
jr
MacBook Pro   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

Answer 1

Your wireless speed will be nowhere CLOSE to 54 Mbit. That is the rating on the specification -- but if you get 20 Mbits/sec you are doing very well. The specifications on wireless are, practically, 2-3 times what anyone can get. It's an industry-wide lie.
There is absolutely no way you will get "good" performance like this. The closest you could come would be to turn on previews. But still... you need a wired connection. It doesn't really matter if drag copying is faster (even by 2-3 times) than working within Aperture for copying... neither are acceptable for working with RAW files. Get a wired (Gigabit) connection or use a direct connection... Firewire 400 or better.