darkstar wrote:
My setup is the duo is on a 100 wired switch, which in turn plugs into a 1gig switch. Ive updated to latest firmware.
I would think you’d want the Duo on a Gig switch?
Yeah, @darkstar - you’re bottlenecking at the 100mpbs switch.
You will never get more than roughly 9MB/sec out of a 100mbps switch, and having the gig-E switch behind it does you no good.
Think about it like this … 100 Mbps @ 75% efficiency (about the best you can hope for and assumes you’re switching) - that’s about 9,375 Bytes per second (75,000 bits / 8), or 9.15 Megabytes (bytes / 1024).
Using that same logic, your ceiling would be about 93 MB/sec with gigabit ethernet, which is what all of us are running – and trying to understand why, using conventioanl transfers on an inexpensive NAS, we can typically see 50MB/sec or higher, but on the WD My Book Live, you’ll average much less.
In your case, you need to be 100% on gig-ethernet before you benchmark, because the 100 mbps is your bottleneck.
Does that make sense?
Im not to worried about transfer speed on the 100meg switch, didnt have the spare $$$ for a gig switch at the mo, and picked up the 100meg for 10$ new. As mentioned, im not having and issues in transferng files, just pointing out it was working fine for me. I do have isses with the time it takes to index the data, ie build up the photo library cache, this isnt a function of switch speed, but the time it takes to crawl the photos on the duo and realise when new ones appear on wd photo app. This was detailed in a sperate post a week or so back.
Hey guys, lots on this topic and I am having the same issue. I’m no IT expert and don’t understand the suggested fixes. Is there a downloadable fix from WD??
Thanks,
Matt
Hey,
I can’t seem to get that fix to work, I am just your average mac user and this is a bit specialised. Does anyone know if there is a WD download for this?
Thanks,
Thank for all your help with this issue. It ceased to be a reasonable challenge and became a time waster. It developed other problems - for example, some files could not be deleted - and I needed to move on. I finally gave up on fiddling, tweaking and testing. WD have agreed to replace it with a 6Tb dual drive Firewire model. So right at this moment it is undergoing a reset to factory specs in preparation for the exchange. I anticipate contact from them in the next week or so to organise the swap. For me, ths is the best solution, even tough I am out of pocker a few dollars. I can write it off to tax and experience. I will stay in touch with this forum to see how things work out. Best!
Hi mmoonshi,
I’m running 10.6.8 on a mac book pro and having the same trouble as others in this thread.
I’ve tried to correctly follow the commands in terminal but am having a great deal of trouble locating the config file. It says a swap file exists but when I delete this and create a new, it can not be found. Then it says a swap file exists and keeps going round like this.
I have connected my live book 2tb drive directly to my ethernet - in network utility it show a 1gbit connection/speed.
However, to browse folders and subfolders within the drive is pitifully slow and it is taking literally hours to back up data.
I’m sure your solution must work but I can’t quite understand what I am doing wrong.
I hope you can help.
Many Thanks!
I’m having a variation on this problem it seems. I’m not a very technical person so if you can help in simple terms, that would be greatly appreciated. I have a Mybook II 4TB drive with 400/800 Firewire. I’m using it along with another 2 TB Mybook II drive. The 4TB is connected to my iMac’s Firewire port (I believe it is 800) and the 2 TB is connected to the 4TB drive. My iMac has a 3.06 GHz Intel Core Duo processor, 2 GB 800 Mhz DDR2 SDRAM, and is running OS X 10.6.8. My problems seems to be with the 4TB drive (which has 3.21 of the 4TB used). It runs really slow when opening up certain directories. It can take a between a minute to 2 minutes to open up a directory. Also, any subdirectories within that particular directory have the same problem, regardless of the amount of files they contain or size of the files. But it still seems to copy files at a halfway decent clip or maybe I just don’t know any better (it took about 20 minutes to copy 65 Gb). This was not always the case. It seemed like for a year and or so everything worked fine. But about 6 months ago I began to notice that when opening certain directories, it really slowed down. There were some directories that I avoided because they took so long to open. And Finder would hang up while the drive was opening the directory. Frustrating as **bleep**. I thought it was strange but I was in denial. Now it seems that there are other directories which were not a problem, but have also begun running slow. This is not intermittent. Once a directory starts to take awhile to open, it continues to do so. So it seems something has changed about that directory. When this is happening, it seems like the drive is asleep or in some sort of rest mode. The vertical light across the front which is usually solid while the drive is in use, moves up and down in a slow, anemic motion. I haven’t tried mmoonshi’s “message 14” fix yet. It seems a bit over my head but I’m certainly willing to give it a go. I just want to make sure that this description of my problem isn’t pointing to something else.
Thanks in advance to anyone who might have some advice.
Roi
Try daisy chaining in a different configuration. I hac a 1Tb with the vertical strip led and a newer 2Tb with the LCD display. I find they work best with the 1Tb at the end of the chain. Also consider swapping the FireWire ports on the drive in the middle ie swap input and output cables. If the increasingly slow to open files are on just one drive then it is possible that the drive is failing. Backup while you can and test the drive.
Today I was trying to solve my problems when I found this post, and now that I consider solved, I here present my findings. First, I have a WD MyBookLive 3TB, not the same product, but with the same problems related: decades to delete files, a long time to open folders, very bad transfer rates… I have this device since last August and only now I decided to solve this situation.
My devices: Mac Mini i7 (gigabit, Mountain Lion 10.8.2), WNDR 4500 (gigabit) and MBL 3TB.
Steps I took:
1) I have one old 10/100 D-Link router for slow devices, such as printer, VOIP… This old device is connected to my WNDR, so I shut it down to check results: nothing happened.
2) I was using wi-fi (5GHz), so I changed to ethernet cable. Again, nothing changed.
3) I tried those codes shown here (“message 14”), without success.
4) I tried remake the first steps (like a brand new device), nothing new again.
5) MBL was connected with WNDR, so I connected my Mac directly with MBL. Problems remains.
6) I read here how to change the device with Unix codes. I used to be good at MSDOS (remember memmaker??), but that was a long time ago and, today, no chance for me to try those codes. But this tip headed me for the solution.
6a) I went to my dashboard and discovered several commands activated. I deactivated firmware AutoUpdate, TimeMachine Backup, checked WorkGroup to be identical as my MacMini, no FTP, static IP defined, remote access disabled, TwonkyMedia disabled, iTunes disabled. I had active: date&time, email notifications and energy saver. Then I reboot to see a dramatic change: folders browsing as expected and good transfer rates!
6b) I activated TimeMachine and reconnected WNDR and the old DLink router, it kept working fine: read 70 MB/s (60.000 random files).
Curiosity: when making those changes, I realized that for 2 months I had only 2GB of TimeMachine backup!
Regards,
Fabricio
I felt duty bound to add my contribution to this subject because I, too, experienced very slow backups to begin with (many weeks for a 400+GB backup, which proved unreliable) and for almost a year I tried to understand what was wrong.
It has been many weeks since I found a fix and the backing up process, whether via cable or wireless, or using TM or by drag-copying, is now relatively quick: 2GBpm for cable, 12MBps for wireless. It is also proving reliable.
I have the 6TB MBLD, configured for RAID 1, and it appears to be behaving itself.
It is my impression that the very slow backups reported throughout this Forum is software/firmware related. I came to the conclusion that some of the applications I was running on my MacBook Pro were in conflict with the way the WD application operated. Eliminate the conflict and the backups will speed up.
My own subject (philharve) details my failures and successes in getting the MBLD to work correctly.
Hi
Have read this thread with interest and as I have had my 6TB MBD for some time now and am not happy with it due to the speed issues mentioned I intend to cut my losses and buy a Synology DS213+ or similar and install the two drives from my MBD into it. This going to cost me £200+ to do. Is there any reason i cant do this.?
Mmoonshi, can;t agree entirely with that. I did some manual drag & drops from my Windows 7 machine across the network. It seemed faster than from the Mac Pro, but still not as fast as my little Iomega Netdisk USB drive.
Is WD working on fixing the “slowness” problem with a firmware update or other patch?
Snakes wrote:
Is WD working on fixing the “slowness” problem with a firmware update or other patch?
If you read through this thread, you’ll see that the lion’s share of problems are not the MBLD – it’s the network or the client PC.
Tony_Mathey’s stuff, while on target, is moot after the processes in question are done running. If you see my post about 4 pages up, you’ll see that I have very good performance without doing any system modifications at all.
I am having the same issue with a My Book Live 2TB drive and my iMac. The solution you describe sounds like the answer but I have no Terminal experience and can’t seem to follow along with any success.
I open terminal
I type “su -” and I am prompted for a password but when I try and type my password, nothing happens.
I feel like non of the other steps are going to apply correctly because I can’t figure out this most simple step.
Can you walk a lay-person through this a bit more carefully?
Moonshi, can you provide complete instructions on how to enter all of the information you listed below, especially how to save the file and exit out of terminal after you complete the instruction below. Thanks
also any way to check to see if you completed the editing correctly?
Thanks
I see your screen captures and I get the great performance when communicating with the drive from a Windows 7 computer, but when I use my Mac the performance is slow, real slow. I do most of my work from a Mac.
I have a NEW WD MBLD 4TB, I updated the firmware (MyBookLiveDuo 02.41.05-034 : Core F/W) and went to town backing up. I now have 875GB of data on the drive and I want to copy it to my office server.
I took the device on site from home to my office and plugged it into my office’s Gigabit LAN. (Previously I enabled SSH) Typed this:
rsync -avz --progress shares shares/ root@192.168.1.100/Folder
I get 1MB/s.
My recieving server is quad core Xeon with dual NICs, and my Switch is a managed Netgear gigabit switch with a private VLAN for this connection.
SO I thought maybe my network is misconfigured. So I plugged in a WD barebones usb drive to the USB port on the MBLD and tried rsync -avz --progress shares shares/External_HDD/
This too said 1MB/s.
I have resorted to copying via the windows OS GUI folder to folder and I get 7MB/s-8MB/s
At this rate Ill finish in 40 hours. Completely weak for a 4tb device made in 2012.
What the heck am I doing wrong, or is this device a junker?
Well, “rsync -avz” is pretty processor intensive, and the MBL doesn’t have just the fastest processor around.
The fact that your receiving server is a quad-Xeon makes absolutely no difference… it’s the MBL that has to do all the heavy lifting.
-avz requires each file to have an md5 checksum computed (or whatever hash rsync uses these days) plus do compression.
I’d bet that if you ran “top” from another SSH session you’d see the CPU fairly well pegged out.
I’d bet if you ran rsync from the Xeon instead, it’d be 20-50x faster.
