I could only get about 7kb/s from my NDP over the WAN port, both using SSH from this very server and unsuspecting people from my Windows Live Messenger contact list to test the download speed from my drive - and I hadn't a clue what was wrong. I'd spent ages browsing through the Freecom forums, and the Freecom Storage Gateway site to find an answer to the most annoying problem ever. I even emailed Freecom support who didn't know what the hell i'd done - and all it took was a little thinking.

No, it wasn't a setting on the drive itself, but my Netgear DG834G's Maximum Transmission Unit setting was set to 1492, instead of 1500 which it was set to on the network drive. I found this out by running the ifconfig command on the drive using SSH, only to have a small eureka moment shortly before kicking myself quite hard.

My drive is now chugging along happily at about 90kb/s when people download from it - which is quite substantially more acceptable than the speed I was getting before. Damn router.