Unworkable with a Mac

Commiserations to anyone on here who has bought one of these to use with a Mac. I shelled out about £150 for a 2Tb mybook live instead of the rather heavy £250 for the apple time capsule. Against my better judgement I believed the advice of PC World. Should have gone to specsavers. They would have been as much use. I thought this would do the job to use as a wireless central backup drive and extra storage for my iMac and mac book pro. 

I was wrong. I connected it to my router and found it was very slow to use as a time capsule backup over Wi Fi. In fact it failed so many times that in the end I have taken to connecting it via an ethernet cable directly (I know it’s not designed for that but it’s the only way I can get it to complete a backup). I was also told that this would be suitable to use as a central iTunes library over WiFi for all the computers in my house. Again wrong. It has to manually be connected to the drive every time I want to look at iTunes, despite the fact that it is now on my desk, constantly connected via the provided ethernet cable. It can then take several minutes to bring up my library and if I want to add a new CD, I can go off and make my lunch in the intervening time.

It isn’t my router as it doesn’t work even with my macbook sitting right next to the router.

It slows down the whole mac when it is trying to open a finder window to explore the drive, like the OS is so disgusted with me that it is doing it out of protest. Also every time I add a track to itunes the drive grumbles away for hours and hours (literally over night sometimes). I don’t like the fact that it overworks itself so much as this is supposed to be my backup. Simply Mean Time Between Failure means that the more it works the sooner it dies.

My fault for being a cheapskate. I should have known better. It has cost me hours of desk time just trying to configure it. I have seen so many ‘slow with mac’ posts on here but can’t see any resolved.

Anyone with any ideas?

Imac OS 10.7.5

Mybook Live 2gB

mattchez,

The WD My Book Live has a 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet connection. Actual transfer rates can vary based on your local area network topology, hard drive disk read/write speeds, system activity, and length of cable. To achieve maximum transfer rates, we recommend using Giga-bit network devices, because your transfer rates will only be as fast as your slowest network component.

You may also want to click on the following link for some suggestions on how to improve your network transfer rate.

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5736