I’ve just purchased a WD MyBook Live Duo 8TB. I installed it according to the instructions and applied the firmware update MyBookLiveDuo 02.43.03-022. My Netgear gigabit switch shows it’s in 1000Mb/s mode, and the MBLD shows a green LED on it’s ethernet port.
I am getting horrifically slow copy speeds from this thing.
Using SyncBack to create a mirror copy of a 4TB drive, I am seeing 4MB/s copy speeds (average over 10 hours) and an estimated completion time of 12 days!
Well maybe it’s an issue with SyncBack. So lets try the vendor supplied WD SmartWare software instead. So after waiting ages for it to “catagorise” my files (I want everything backed up, so this was a waste of time) it started coping files at the blistering speed of… ~250KB/s!
I bought this drive to replace my 4TB Acer Aspire easyStore NAS. Now keep in mind that the Acer was a low-end, budget consumer NAS, purchased 7 years ago. On the same setup as the WDMBLD it gives 36MB/s. Almost 10x what the WD unit is giving me at best, and ~140x faster than what WD SmartWare backup is doing.
At the moment the WD MBLD is too slow to be of any use as a backup device for anything!
Eg: Windows file copy speed
And the RAID0 array it was copying from:
The first image you posted indicates that you’re trying to WRITE over FOUR MILLION files, with a total size of 4.38TB, which means the average file is only one kilobyte in size.
That type of copy will *slaughter* ANY NAS. Copying numerous small files *ALWAYS* will slow down ANY filesystem.
It’s hard to believe that your Acer NAS would do the same file copy at 36MB/second – but no way to say either way from first-hand experience.
TonyPh12345 wrote:
The first image you posted indicates that you’re trying to WRITE over FOUR MILLION files, with a total size of 4.38TB, which means the average file is only one kilobyte in size.
Your math is off.
1,024 bytes = 1KB
1,048,576B = 1MB
1,073,741,824B = 1GB
1,099,511,627,776B = 1TB
I’m copying 4.11TB, so 1,099,511,627,776 x 4.11 = 4,518,992,790,159 bytes.
4,518,992,790,159 bytes / 4,382,261 files = 1,031,201 bytes average per file or 1,007KB, or 0.98MB average per file.
And in case you wondering what I’m backing up, it’s my Steam game library. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a NAS sold with a 8TB capacity to fill half of that capacity quicker than my current estimated backup time of over 7 days!
TonyPh12345 wrote:
It’s hard to believe that your Acer NAS would do the same file copy at 36MB/second – but no way to say either way from first-hand experience.
Yet that’s what I actually get, as reported by SyncBack. Unfortunatly the Acer NAS is only 3.6TB formatted so isn’t big enough, hence why I bought the MBLD.
ChrisMcMahon wrote:Your math is off.
Uhm, indeed it was! (Throwing my Math Merit Badge away now…) :flushed:
My guess at this point is that it’s the media / DLNA indexing process which is running as files upload, which causes the hard drive heads to thrash wildly and consume CPU.
Log in via SSH and run the “top” process and see what’s going on during the upload process.
If that’s what the issue is, the processes can be safely disabled through various means (either permanently or temporarily) to improve performance during heavy file transfers.
TonyPh12345 wrote:
My guess at this point is that it’s the media / DLNA indexing process which is running as files upload, which causes the hard drive heads to thrash wildly and consume CPU.
I thought of background tasks slowing things down before. I’ve turned everything (Remote Access, Media Streaming, iTunes Server) off via web interface. Of coarse if there’ something running that has no user control and can’t be turned off I wouldn’t know.
I also tried giving it a static IP as a few posts seemed to think that helped. I’ll try anything at this point.
TonyPh12345 wrote:
Log in via SSH and run the “top” process and see what’s going on during the upload process.
If that’s what the issue is, the processes can be safely disabled through various means (either permanently or temporarily) to improve performance during heavy file transfers.
I’ve never used SSH before so I’m flying blind here. I’ve figured out how to turn it on and downloaded putty. Typing “top” once logged on resulted in this:
If you want me to do anything more specific in ssh, you’ll have to explain it like I’m a 3 year old.
ChrisMcMahon wrote:
If you want me to do anything more specific in ssh, you’ll have to explain it like I’m a 3 year old.
You’re right on target there.
Just do the same thing while you’re doing that copy of a million files.
Start the copy, wait a few minutes, then run TOP like you did above, and post a new screenshot. You can stop the file copy if you want to after you’ve grabbed the screenshot.
TonyPh12345 wrote:
Just do the same thing while you’re doing that copy of a million files.
That was during the copy.
My currnet backup session has been running for 41 hours so far. And previous session, for 10 hours before that. (The good thing about Syncback is that you can start and stop the backup without needing to restart from the beginning).
So total backup time so far is ~51 hours. With another ~5 days estimated until completion.
