New MyBook Duo 4Tb astonishingly slow... I mean, really soul-numbingly slow

Hi there

i have a mid-2013 Mac Book Pro (which I bought about 6 weeks ago).

I tried updating the .conf file as directed.

It’s made no difference at all.

1,8Gbytes transfer takes 12 minutes.

This is completely unusable. It would be faster to go back to floppy disks.

I’ve never been quite so angry, frustrated and irritated by a product in all my born days. Bear in mind that I’m a former Volvo owner, so I know whereof I speak.

The time I’ve spent trawling the net and the hours I’ve spent trying to get 200Gbytes of data onto my 3Tbyte drive – well it’s criminal.

I’d like to tell you where I want to put this oversized paperweight, but this is a very polite forum.

I am at my wits’ end and I don’t know what else to do.

A complete waste of nearly $300 in my country.

Well, I tried with a gigabit router and the speeds have gone up to 30-35 mbps.

It is now February 2, 2014 - about two MONTHS after I last posted here. A report:

  • I have never been able to completely back up the 3.2 terrabytes of my Imac primary desktop computer to the MBLD over our gigabit ethernet system. I got as close as 2/3 of the way once - after something like three WEEKS of backing up, but then it failed and Time Machine reported that the backup was corrupted and that it needed to replace it. VERDICT: NO BACKUP HAS BEEN SUCCESSFUL.
  • I managed to successfully backup up two MacBook Air laptops to the MBLD - the largest is approximately 200 GB. However, within days (or sometimes on the first successive update of the backup) the Mac checks the integrity of the backup and finds problems that require the backup to be - you guessed it! - completely redone. VERDICT: NO SUCCESSFUL BACKUP THAT DOESN’T NEED TO BE COMPLETELY REBUILT ALMOST IMMEDIATELY.
  • A second desktop iMac finished one backup (after several WEEKS in process) but almost immediately got the infamous message about the integrity of the backup and the need to rebuild it from scratch. VERDICT: NO BACKUP HAS BEEN SUCCESSFUL.

All four Macs are running the most current version of OS X. Two are connected via wired gigabit ethernet system. The Macbook Air computers have tried via wireless, and via both Firewire and USB to wired ethernet adapters. 

All four computers previoiusly backed up via Time Machine to another networked Mac  with multiple external drives on the ethernet wihtout problems. We believed - oh, boy, what a mistake! - that replacing the mac backup machine with your network drive would be an improvement - smaller, faster, dedicated. 

We have had to resort to an entirely separate external backup system (using different drives and different software) since we cannot remotely consider relying on this product for Time Machine backups of our computers. I’ve tried numerous kludgy work-arounds described in this forum and elsewhere on the net. None have worked reliably - but it has become crystal clear that the problems that I have had are widespread among users and that the silence from WD about this failure of a product has been virtually complete.

So far this product has been the most disappointing failure of any computing product that I can recall acquiring.

I’m considering simply stripping out the drives at this point, installing them in a third-party enclosure, and attaching them to an old computer so that I can return to making backups the  way I did before getting this product. Are there any warnings I need to know about concerning that idea?

After some time not following this thread I am sorry to see that the pathetic saga of this device continues unabated. The best advice I have been able to give anyone is RETURN THE DEVICE if you have been unlucky enough to have already bought one. If you have net yet had the misfortune to buy one of these then DON’T do it. The device is fundamentally flawed and cannot possibly work as advertised. Period.

I did remove the HDD from my device and installed it into a spare Linux box I have lying around. The best performance I have seen from the raw hard drive on my Linux box is surprisingly low. While I can’t recall the exact speed it is a LOT less than the other HDD installed in the same box. So I have concluded that WD simply uses these devices as a way of selling hard drives that they could not otherwise sell as standalone units due to their being outdated and slow.

My sympathies to everyone that has had to endure the miserable experience of buying and trying to use this device.

Hey {removed per user request}, this posting really helped with my MBLD using Leopard a on MBP.   It’s definitely faster, only a bit mind.

BUT I have done the same pass on my mac mini using Mountain Lion and now lost my internet connection.

Do you have any solutions oher than re-installing the OS please?

Thank you kindly

Chekers

The real question is:

How can they sell such a product?

How can anybody be satisfied by this product, 8 hours for 13 GB ???

Until this product I bought WD products without a doubt… now I will never by their products any more…

I’ve had them several times on the phone, the only thing they say is… what do you prefer? Do you prefer us to send you a new product , or do you want your money back? But there’s no way they can solve the problem !

hi have similar problem with mbdl seamingly running slow but having problems with the file writing on my mac, think Im getting the terminal commands wrong  :flushed:

thanks in advance

I have a Duo and have never experienced a problem so severe.  I think you should ask WD to send you a new product.  You may have just got a bad one.

I followed the directions in this post, running dos.sh. Unfortunately, my drive now hangs on reboot. After giving it ten minutes, I unplugged and tried again, and it still won’t boot. What do I do now? Many thanks. 

Hello,

I m facing performance issues when I using apple finder to browse data in mybook live duo. It is out of my expectation. I follow your suggestion, edit and key in those setting, no improvement . Pls advise

Hi all,

I have just come across this thread and I did initially have similar problems which are now resolved. I transfer to the drive at about ~ 22MB/s. The two points below should help (and I know point 1 is stating the obvious).

  1. This does require a GB connection. If you have a bottleneck anywhere where it drops to 100mb/s which is about 10BM/s, the WD appears to auto ajust the speed down further. I upgraded my network to a 1GB router (EA 4500) and the network card on my desktop to a 1GB card also. Forget wireless or anything under 1GB. I have the WD directly attached to my router via a GB port and it makes all the difference.

  2. This is the piece which saw my speeds increase from 10MB/s to 22MB/s. Assign the WD Box a static IP address. I changed the config of the router to make sure my WD had a reserved IP and since then no isseus at all. Transfer speeds doubled (and no, I don’t know why :slight_smile:

I posted the above on my Amazon review and it appears to work for other individuals as well. Worth a try…

I too am at a loss.

In Australia, have a BigPond standard issue Netgear router - CG3100D-2.

My MBLD is very slow - am lucky to get the Dashboard working 50% of the time.  Using Finder (on Mac) if I see an AVI and click to view then the movie is buffering, blocky, and doesnt play.

Takes around 1 hour to copy one 2.3GB movie.

I compare this to my PS3 (also wireless) and that can download a 8GB game from the Internet in around 30 minutes.

Why is the MBLD so slow?  I try to use it for iTunes server and will not respond.  Try to watch movies from it and stutters and is very slow…

Not overly technically minded… what can I do??

I have checked my Router, and under the DHCP Client Lease area, is has the MAC add off the MBLD with an IP address and the Expirt says - STATIC IP ADDRESS.  I assume this means the Router has dedicated a Static IP for the MBLD. However in the Dashboard, it has DHCP, and a DIFFERENT IP address… could this be the problem???

Thanks

Hi there friends

My MBLD 4T was incredibly slow for the first year…it all changed just a few weeks ago.

I thought I’d share my experience.

This has been a very trying time and I know I’m not alone.   Hours and hours spent transfering data, trying to logon to the dashboard, get timemachine to work at all, running endless diagnostics tests, searching the forum and messing around with terminal.

My transfer speeds never got above 2MB/s

One day I decided to plug the MBLD directly to my MBP ethernet port (I had done this before BTW).  

Things didn’t seem to improve.

I opened Network Utility and checked it was actually respondning to ping…it did!

In the dashboard, I ran the short diagnostic test.

I rebootedthe MBLD.

I re-ran the test.

I ran the long test.

Everything seemingly took forever and I abandoned the long test.

I tried to check for firmware updates, but it claimed I wasn’t connected to the internet.

I turned on wireless and checked I was able to load a web page…I could.

I ran the “check for update” and still no joy.

I knew the software was up-to-date, it’s just that dashboard couldn’t confirm it.

I re-started the Mac and made sure I was online.

I loaded the dashboard and this time it recognised I was online and confirmed the firmware was the current version, still connected directly to the MBLD.

Then, I decided to save a report.   This was the incisive moment.

For some reason, from this moment everything changed.  

I didn’t know this at the time, but eventually I gave up and plugged everything back as it was…via my Netgear gigabit switch.

Once online, wired via ethernet and switch, the dashboard worked much quicker. 

Plus I got much higher transfer speeds, up to 18MB/s.

Much more like it…not great but certainly better.

I dunno whether this will help anyone, but there was something I did with this combination of events that enabled the drive to start working considerably better for the first time.

PLUS, I was able to run timemachine (one of the reasons I bought the device) on my other networked computer, a Mac mini.

BTW I fiddled about in terminal with sudo re-writes etc…and just got into more trouble.   This might work for some computer/software setups but it didnt for mine…ever!

Thanks to all those who posted similar issues, providing endless reading and hope, but finally it works.

Do let me know if any of this has helped.

Sorry not to have one specific thing that made it work, but I do think the report

I’ve had most of these same problems as well. My ‘workaround’ was to start my backup before I went to bed, make sure my laptop didn’t go to sleep, and hope the next morning that my files would all be transfered. (I have a lot of RAW image files that are pretty big.) Sometimes I was lucky; other times not. 

Anyhoo, now that my MBLD is almost full I am wondering how I can remove all the files. I tried plugging in my new RAID directly into my MBLD and at the stated transfer rate it will take about a month or so. Is there any faster way? Is it possible to just remove the drives (just one, as it’s been in RAID 1 mode since I got it) and use a SATA to USB link? 

Hi.  Count me in on the “what is going on with my File Transfer to MBLD” bandwagon.

I had another external drive start to fail; unfortunately it had my photo library on it; fortunately I had it backed (Time Machine, and Crashplan).  My first attempt to recover that “file” was to fix the “bad” disk and recover the files from it to my main OS X disk - but I needed to clear space on the OS disk and therefore move a fairly sizeable chunk of folders/files to the MBLD.

Regardless, during the intervening days I’ve been reading this thread (mostly) and trying various things out as my transfers of files to the MBLD disk were sooo slooow.  Like 20kB/s (or worse).  I.E. a few GB worth of folder/files taking hours.

But then I went looking into TimeMachine (which is stored on a different partition on the MBLD), found my photo library and restored it - all 130GB - in about 1.5 Hours - which is more like 20-25MB/s.

So, that’s what I don’t get.  Astonishingly slow transfers while copying/moving folder/files, and pretty good speed restoring an iphoto library file (that is really composed of a whole lot of individual folders/files, right?).

So, two different processes… two different partitions on the MBLD.  Can anyone shed some light on that?

I posted a lengthy message to this forum yesterday about the severe and serious problems associated with my MBLD, stating that the MBLD was not fit for the purpose for which it was advertised or sold.

My post was removed by a moderator simply because I stated that I would be pursuing the issue further. PM me if you are interested in how I plan to pursue this further, as it seems any hint of “futher action” on this forum will simply see my message deleted again.

Here, however, are the technical details of the issue:

I have a MBLD 8tb set to a 4tb mirror. I started using this some time ago as an archival drive. I have recently attempted to archive more material to the drive, but it is unbelievably, unreasonably slow and defective.

For example, I tried to move 2.3GB of font files from the MBLD to my internal iMac HDD. This took some 21hours. Compared to another transfer I did between the internal iMac HDD and a firewire drive, I moved 30gb in a matter of minutes. When I have a direct ethernet connection to the MBLD the speed should be much greater than several kilobytes a minute.

Attached are screengrabs of the issue. This is definitely, 100% not the speeds indicated in advertising or promotion of this product. This is far far worse than ANY other drive on the market today. As such the WD MBLD is not fit for the purpose for which it was advertised.

Screen Shot 2015-01-15 at 12.01.10 pm.png Screen Shot 2015-01-15 at 12.32.00 pm.png Screen Shot 2015-01-15 at 12.45.01 pm.png

How are you connected to the drive?  Are you connecting through a router on your network?  I’ve read some of your older posts and you have been saying that you were connecting the network drive directly to your computers - both a pc and a mac. If that is so, then I’m amazed that you’re getting any transfer rate at all. 

I know TonyPH12345 told you it could be done, but you need to understand that that is not how that drive is designed to function. Now, if you are correctly setting it up on the network through a router, and you’re still getting those kinds of transfer rates, then you need to let us help you. You may have serious issues with that drive.  It may actually need to be replaced.

And I’m here to tell you to proceed carefully with the Tony cure. I tried it. Now, instead of being slow, my drive is bricked. That’s been my situation for the past six months as I look at the scary options to rebuild it.

scottg wrote:

I posted a lengthy message to this forum yesterday about the severe and serious problems associated with my MBLD, stating that the MBLD was not fit for the purpose for which it was advertised or sold.

 

My post was removed by a moderator simply because I stated that I would be pursuing the issue further. PM me if you are interested in how I plan to pursue this further, as it seems any hint of “futher action” on this forum will simply see my message deleted again.

 

Here, however, are the technical details of the issue:

I have a MBLD 8tb set to a 4tb mirror. I started using this some time ago as an archival drive. I have recently attempted to archive more material to the drive, but it is unbelievably, unreasonably slow and defective.

 

For example, I tried to move 2.3GB of font files from the MBLD to my internal iMac HDD. This took some 21hours. Compared to another transfer I did between the internal iMac HDD and a firewire drive, I moved 30gb in a matter of minutes. When I have a direct ethernet connection to the MBLD the speed should be much greater than several kilobytes a minute.

 

Attached are screengrabs of the issue. This is definitely, 100% not the speeds indicated in advertising or promotion of this product. This is far far worse than ANY other drive on the market today. As such the WD MBLD is not fit for the purpose for which it was advertised.

 

Screen Shot 2015-01-15 at 12.01.10 pm.png Screen Shot 2015-01-15 at 12.32.00 pm.png Screen Shot 2015-01-15 at 12.45.01 pm.png

 

 

 

 

…and which screenshots are which?   Those data rates are completely normal.

If you’re comparing copying tens of thousands of SMALL files (which takes hours) to a few HUGE files (which takes minutes), that’s how ALL consumer-grade NASes WORK.    The file overhead to create a file, allocate the space for it, copy it over the network, commit it to disk, wait for IO to complete, etc is *much* worse when copying small files versus large ones.

Hope you find satisfaction somewhere else…

1 Like

How could i add 

/etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server stop && /etc/init.d/nfs-common stop && /etc/init.d/upnp_nas stop && /etc/init.d/mDNSResponder stop && /etc/init.d/wdphotodbmergerd stop && /etc/init.d/wdmcserverd stop 

to a startup script so i dont have to do it all the time?