Moving files from Win7 to A-300 - FTP works, mapping network drive doesn't

[Asterra]

Topic. Using Windows 7, I'm trying to begin transferring all my media to the 3TB drive in my brand new A-300. It's formatted as ext3, per the built-in setup.

I read all the guides and posts and reposts about this topic. Here are the choices I seem to have:

1) USB3 slave. Unfortunately, this option is highly dubious. Not only does the wiki compatibility chart (and other resources) point out that the 3TB Caviar Green is, for whatever reason, incompatible with the USB3 slave option, but since the A-300 did not come with anything I would be willing to call a manual, I am hesitant to start hooking two powered USB devices together to see what happens. What if I get the wrong port? What if there was some ostensibly "common knowledge" first step that I failed to implement, resulting in both my PC and the A-300 being fried? (You know. "Common knowledge" like the fact that the A-300 uses a file system that Windows 7 cannot recognize.) Besides, I don't have USB3 on my PC anyway.

2) Map network drive. Tried it. Got the correct IP, used nmt/1234 as user/pass, and nothing. Installed and ran ext2fsd, leaving it running in the background, and things still didn't work. I admit I don't really know what I'm supposed to do with ext2fsd once I've got it running; I assumed it would just be a compatibility flag to enable ext3 drives to be recognized, sort of like adding a plugin to Winamp so it can recognize and use a new music file format.

3) FTP. This seems to work. But I would really, really rather not have to use this solution because it is a kludge. As it stands, I am looking at having to decompress about 2TB of videos and then FTP them over, rather than being able to decompress them to the A-300 which would be twice as fast and save me from having to baby the whole process due to lack of drive space.

Anyone know why #2 would be failing to work?

[halfelite]

do you have samba turned on under setup/nmt apps on the pch? and ext2fsd is not needed for mapping a drive that is using a samba network protocol you would only need ext2fsd if you are using the usb slave port.

also if these are rar files you are decompressing there is really no speed difference. When you unrar a rar it actually goes to local temp file first then out over samba.

[Asterra]

Thanks. I figured it would be something simple and easy. I didn't turn it on because literally none of the guides said to do so. Let's file it under "common knowledge". ;p