[X4U] OT: NAS Slows to a Crawl

[Neil]

I have a Buffalo Terrastation 2TB NAS RAID connected via SMB.  It  
always feels slower than a NFS+ device connected via Firewire or  
USB2, but this has gotten ridiculously slow recently.  Now, it takes  
several minutes just to open a folder.  It takes several more minutes  
just to move a group of files to another folder.   I tried  
restarting.  That helped for a couple hours once, but not the last  
time.  I just restarted and the first thing after restart I tried to  
open a folder on the SMB share and it still hasn't opened in the time  
it has taken me to launch mail and type this message.  Does anybody  
have any ideas?

Neil
PowerMac G5/2x2, 1.5gigs RAM, Mac o/s 10.4.9
connected to the NAS via a TRENDnet gigabit switch