SMB speed problems and NAS devices

Question

I posted this under the Online networking section, but it drew no responses (no one actually read it). So clearly NAS and SMB is not much of an issue there. I apologies for the double posting but I hope to get some clarity here.
I appreciate that this has been raised a few times before, but searching the forum has not yielded a satisfactory answer and perhaps some solutions were lost in the the forum upgrade. So apologies in advance. My issues/concerns are as follows:
1. I have my PB 15 connected through SMB to an XP desktop (XP Home). I can access the shared drive/folder and the PC can access the PB. However, the SMB transfer is dreadfully slow. I have made some changes to the sysctl.conf file by entering the string 'large readwrite = no' and 'net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0' but this has yielded no tangible improvement in file transfer speed. I used the following website http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20051107090652912 for help. It seems that after 4 updates to Tiger and 9 updates to Panther, Apple has been unable to improve the transfer speed or at least that is my impression.
2. I now wish to install a NAS device. I run a Netgear DG834G wireless router with connection to Win2K, WinXP, OS X 10.4.4, Airport Express, Canon wireles iP4000R. The idea is of course to use the NAS device to store my music and photos and provide a central storage for documents/scans. In theory all seems fine, but I am dreading the slow transfer speeds. I notice that the NAS devices are either Linux based or Windows Server 2003 based (Lacie Ethernet disk). Now I also read that these devices have difficulty with filenames >31 characters. I would, therefore, very much appreciate some help as, although I can do some basic networking, I am quite poor on Unix and more sophisticated network commands.
I also have one other query which baffles me. I can read and write to my XP computer through SMB even though it is formatted in NTFS. However, if the NAS device is formatted in NTFS, the Mac cannot write to it. Why should this be the case? I always thought an NAS device is just a basic computer with some hard drives and if it is running the Windows kernel, and using SMB, why should it have a problem. Of course, the reverse is also true (i.e. formatting in HFS+).
I'm sure these appear quite basic questions, but I am unable to get answers by just 'Googling' and asking the Apple Store Geniuses these questions just draws blank responses (that is after all the effort to get to the store and make appointments etc.).
This is a long post, but I believe that for any NAS device to become truly useful on the Mac, Apple needs to fix the SMB speed. Backups will be inordinately slow and cumbersome and also sharing and moving large files will limit its usefulness. This issue is not of concern to most Windows users, as they are well catered for.
Regards
Nazir

Answer 1

I also have one other query which baffles me. I can
read and write to my XP computer through SMB even
though it is formatted in NTFS. However, if the NAS
device is formatted in NTFS, the Mac cannot write to
it. Why should this be the case?
Remember when writing from a Mac to a shared drive on an XP PC, the XP is doing the actual reading and the writing and not the Mac which is merely asking the XP PC to do so on its behalf.
iFelix