I have a WD 3Tb My Book Live and I regularly get 30mBytesps wirelessly. It is a NAS so I can’t connect it directly to my PC so can’t give you comparison speeds Sorry to say, your speeds sound poor
USB2 external drives can manage around 35MBps (that is mega-bytes-per-second).
100Mbps Ethernet, which is all the WD SMP units support, give only 10-12MBps throughput.
So right there, your speed writing to a 100Mbps networked device will be well below a USB2 local drive.
Then there is the issue of CPU power required. As KAD79 says, the WD SMP has a pretty low power CPU. Reading data from a network card and then writing it to a USB device takes quite a bit of CPU. I suggest you take a look at your PC’s CPU usage when you are writing large files to your USB drive.
As noted, Wifi throughput can be very hard to predict because it depends on many factors. Just remember that speeds that you see quoted, like “up to 300Mbps,” are virtually always raw signaling rates, and actual data throughput is going to be less than half that rate (often way, way less than half that rate). In most areas of my house, I get only about 2MBps for “n” Wifi file transfers to laptops! (This is with access point settings that favor reliability over speed.)
Gigabit Ethernet is the only high performance option: network tests I ran through multiple switches showed throughputs of up to 990Mbps. In practice, I see close to 60MBps when transferring video files from one internal drive to a remote internal drive via GigE. So my machine to machine file transfers are often limited by the USB2 drives.
Anyway, I am not sure what you were expecting, but the WD SMPs are not really appropriate to function as file server machines. Look at what NAS devices cost. I just looked at Amazon and a 2-bay Synology is twice the price of the WD SMP (and does nothing at all useful without spending even more money for drives!). The great thing about external drives is that you can physically move them. “Sneakernet” with USB3 machines/drives is really quite fast!
I wasn’t really expecting anything. I just have a bunch of movies on the drives. Everyone once in awhile I will rotate some new ones in and remove old ones. Very slow. About 1mB/second…
i just move the usb drive to a pc for the transfer. Don’t have to do it that often
Just wanted to see if performance was as expected. It seems it is
I get about the same performance as ncarver. Nevertheless, I do notice slowness sometimes. I am sure it’s things ramping /spinning up, so I abort the transfer, start transfer again, and stuff then moves faster. Try it.
iamimdoc wrote:
Just wanted to see if performance was as expected. It seems it is
Unfortunately, network file transfers can be relatively slow. 10GigE is coming, however! (10GigE switches are rather pricey right now: Amazon has one for $800.)
I did various copies and generally got 85MBps(that is megabytes per second). :manhappy:
Internal to internal, internal to SSD, internal to USB2 AND USB3 drives.
Not fantastic but acceptable?
According to Wikipedia: “USB 2.0 was released in April 2000 (now called “Hi-Speed”), adding higher maximum signaling rate of 480 Mbit/s (effective throughput up to 35 MB/s or 280 Mbit/s).”
So it is not possible for you to be getting 85MBps copying to a USB 2.0 external drive.
I see 33-35MBps, which is exactly in line with the USB standard. Meaning the transfer rate to the drive is limited by the USB 2.0 interface.
Most likely what you are measuring is the rate to transfer the data to a kernel buffer–not the rate to actually transfer data to the target device. You have to be very careful when doing these kinds of timing tests or your results will not be meaningful. Modern OS’s can use all your free RAM for buffering, so generally speaking, using very large files is a necessity (i.e., bigger than your RAM). If, for example, you repeatedly copy a fairly small file, the entire file may have been cached, and instead of having to be read again it will already been stored in RAM so appear to be extremely fast to read. Copying a different large video file for each test measurement is a good approach.
I did use a file of about 1Gb and the copies peaked at 133MBps but seemed to settle down to 85MBps.
Out of curiousity I did a couple of tests with 11.5Gb and 10.7Gb files and got a way lower speed
My system has 8Gb of memory
USB3 to internal AND USB3 to USB3 and got 31.5MBps. I had expected much higher speed using USB3 so I must be hitting another system limit???
Anyway, learn something new every day :D :D
So that 133MBps is probably max speed reading from an internal drive to cache (RAM), and then once there is no more free RAM for caching the speed “comes down” as it gets averaged with actually doing the writing out of the cache to the target device. 8GB of RAM can make for lots of cache space!
I am currently backing up one of my video backups as the main external drive is throwing read errors. The new drive is supposedly USB3 and plugged into USB3 port, but I am getting only 40MBps sustained writes to it (from an internal drive). I first had it plugged into a USB2 port by mistake and was getting 33-35MBps so stopped it and changed to one of the USB3 ports, but was very disappointed by the slight speed increase. I have a small portable USB3 spinning disk drive that I generally see around 80-90MBps from. Not sure what the problem is with this drive. It is one of those drives with a “now works with USB3” stickers on it. Clearly not really fully USB3!
If you are transferring from one USB device to another then both are probably trying to use the same bus/connection. I don’t know enough about USB design to be sure, but it may be that the USB max throughput is divided for the reading and the writing (with some more lost to delays from switching). This can also take significant CPU.
The fastest speeds I attain between wired gigabit network devices with a USB3 drive attached are: 30MB/sec sending or receiving. The test I did was between my (gigabit) PC w/7200rpm drive, to and from a networked (gigabit) Pogoplug w/USB3 Seagate GoFlex portable drive attached. This is the fastest via network. It is slower (<10MB/s) between PC and USB2 drives connected to WDTV. It is fastest between an esata HD connected to the PC w/internal drive (I have no USB3 port on PC). (Consistant speeds avg 65MB/s with initial peaks of over 220MB/s at startup either direction and slowly dropping to a consistant speed.)
It all depends upon the router/network and the hardware and port connections involved. I believe my speeds under my different kinds of conditions are all fine, so I am going to worry about something else!
I use an older MacBook with 4gb ram. On good days 10 mB / second to usb and 1 mB/ sec to same usb drive hooked to wdtv. Based on -above experiences, it seems that the Wdtv kills performance for this type of activity. But that is not really what it was designed for. Having said that, I did hook several old usb drives to older Wdtvs and they will actually function as a poor mans file server. One can certainly store lots of music or movies and stream around ones network without much of a problem. Photos can be stored too if you are just looking for backup storage
USB3 to NAS - 35MBps (pleasantly surprised as it was more than I expected) :D (N600 gigabit modem)
USB3 to USB2 - 30MBps (about what I expected)
USB3 to USB3 - 126MBps to 154MBps (stayed at over 150 for half the file) (completely contra to the first similiar test)
Tests done by alternating 2 files about 11Gb each (to minimise cacheing)
Desktop PC running Windows 7 64bit with 8Gb 2000 ram and 40Tb of discs (total) including 3 RAID mirrors. ALL my BIG files are on ONE USB3 XHDD (backed up on the NAS) so that was used as the source.
Mine is not bigger than yours, just reporting to anyone interested
Sorry to say, your speeds sound poor 
