Too dang slow! Help!

I’ve had the MyBook Live almost a year now, I have about 1.5 TB of 3TB full, it is all photos in folders. It takes FOREVER to open a folder to view files, and forever to transfer files to the MyBook. Is there a way to speed this up? I double check files before I delete them to make sure they all transferred and I waste so much time waiting for the contents of the folder to appear. I have an iMac running Mavericks with plenty of open space. Help.

I would start by comparing the issues using a wired vs wireless. If the issue persist on both, it might be OS related. If it is on wireless only, might have issues there then.

It is wired directly to my iMac. 

That is not a supported install, if possible, use a router as specified on manual.

Doing it that way without static IPs, you might get different results and weird behavior, such as what you are seeing.

interesting, it’s been plugged in for a year and I thought it’d be faster plugged directly in if I didn’t need to back up other devices. It will run faster wirelessly? And if I unplug and connect to my router will all my data still be on the drive or will it have to be formatted?

wired is faster than wireless. Now if you plug both to the router, should be equally fast, assuming all are the same type of hardware (10/100/1000). Otherwise, it will be as fast as your lowest speed possible.

plugging/unpluggin MBL to different devices will not cause any data to be lost. It will only cause it to get a different IP if any.

The only way to lose your data is if you delete or do factory reset. And of course, if the hard drive dies.

It’s slow from my mac as well man.

What can I say, the disk has 256 mb of ram and is running some distro of Linux. It probably shouldn’t be surprising it doesn’t run that fast.

However, performance is great when accessed from a Windows VM. 

I should have spent the extra and gone straight for the Apple time machine solution. 

Live and learn I suppose.

Ok so you told me to plug it into the router because that’s how it’s designed and may be cause for weird behavior. I did that and now I read that wired to my computer the way I had it is faster? It is still going to the router and is still riduculously slow. I don’t have time to wait 20 minutes for a file folder to open on the drive, I am a professional photographer and constantly needing to move photos from my computer to external drive. This WD MyBook Live is turning out to be a waste of time and money. Any other suggestions before I trash it and get something else? Thanks so much!

And when you say “both should be plugged in” what does that mean? Thanks!

directly plug into the router or not, maybe faster, maybe not. It all depends on the hardware you have and whether all devices are 1gb. But if you plug it directly into the PC, no guarantees it should work if you just have them set to DHCP.

Plugged means you have both the PC and MBL, connected to the router via ethernet.

I’m running a 2011 iMac 2.7 GHz processor speed, 4GB of RAM…I don’t know if that helps. I have my router wirelessly running to my machine, and the MBL is now plugged in via Ethernet cable to my MBL. Currently I’m trying to transfer 10.59 GB of photos from my mac drive to my MBL and it’s telling me it will take about 2 hrs. I clicked on a folder on my MBL to open it and make sure it had the contents that I had just transfered over earlier today, and it still hasn’t showed me what’s in the folder. It’s been like 20 mins. I have 1.76 available on my MBL.  Does any of that help? 

Am I the only one who has this problem with the drive being slow? It’s slow on  both my machines, 2011 iMac and 2013 MacBook Pro…I clicked on the file I wanted to view/open at 12:10 and it’s now 12:27 and still shows me a blank white screen with folder name at the top, and the ‘loading’ wheel twirling on the side. I hate this drive. I want to get something different.

Did you try both, PC and MBL connected to the router with the wireless card disable on PC? It should not be slower than wireless. If you did, you got other problems, hard to tell. Either router issues or a bad MBL.

MBL has not wireless capabilities. Your router controls that part. Hence asking if you did a test as mentioned above. Just try to separate wired vs wireless to see where the issue is.