Hi there,
We have a WD NAS set up at work and has been working great until recently when I tried upgrading the Firmware. Access rate used to be over 30MB/s on a Gigabit network and has now dropped down to 5MB/s. Support with WD has been great up to this point, but now we're at the point where neither of us can figure out what happened. Over a remote connection, WD has rolled back the driver as far back as their database allows (this has been done in stages with a few versions in between to help root out a problem). Nothing has helped. Would anyone be familiar with this situation to tell what has caused this to happen? All workstations which is a mix of XP up to Windows 7 pro have the same result.

get a screenshot on a Win/7 which shows the devices and the router.
Post that as an image you upload to the gallery or some other service
eg ImageShack.com

Thanks Jobeard,
I hope this pic does what you expect.
Not all workstations were on when I did this so they all don't appear, but you can see the basic layout.
The only thing I can guess since nothing has changed in the network structure is maybe a conflicting Windows update which didn't agree with the WD update?

hmm; I have to assume the picture is accurate and that raises issues.

PC#1 (upper left) should be attached to the same switch as PC#2 (lower left).

Why is it NOT and how come there's the '?' device and what is it?

Ok, PC in the upper left is actually the one I am typing this with. The question mark is an ethernet switch. The following describes the network layout.

All PC,s, Sharespace, and router are plugged into the switch (DGS-1016D) Some PC,s through a secondary ethernet switch (the question mark). The modem is simply plugged in the router.

ok, with only ONE router and multiple switches, every pc should be able to PING every other PC using the ip-address of each system.

Find all the addresss and document PCname->ipaddress for all

take that with you everywhere and test using ping -n 10 <one-pc-address>

for each PING request, the times should not vary more than +-2ms

and the times to all of the systems should be very similar.

WATCH and document the times seen (just note one typical time for each system)

We're looking for something like

"all systems attached to switch-x are very different that the others"

Out of all PC's checked, the attached image is the same for all.

I'm wondering why you're commenting about the router. Maybe that is something that could coincidentally improve internet access, but the main problem is the network access from the sharespace. Is there something else that may improve things?