I’ve been using my now old My Cloud as a Network USB hub for my 4TB Passport USB drives and it has been working flawlessly until today,
It really bothers me, a whole lot, on why WD is the only product that just kinda jumps out at you to create a caveat for no apparent reason but they just do; much like the time I was banned from the new forum when I posted up more than two posts or that other time that I booted up my My Cloud with my USB attached… what? ok fine, I’ll stop finger pointing.
The Problem:
Both 4TB Passport, formatted in their default NTFS store bought format, has been working with an average of 80MB/s to 90MB/s read-writes, until today where “one” of the passport drive slowed down considerately, all the way down to a speed of 1.7MB/s read-write; the other Passport continued to work at the normal speed of 80MB/s.
No matter what I did,
- rebooted the My Cloud multiple times
- killed the media services even though no media services were running,
- tested both passports on my Mac via USB3 and they worked perfectly at high USB 3.0 speeds.
- ensured that network connection to the My Cloud was at gigabit speed, it was
- one thing to note is the slow Passport has less than 5% of free space left which is about 200GB.
The slow Passport is filled with thousands and thousands of photos, ebooks, midi files and backups which are the files that gives SMB attached drives, headaches; like if you attempt to browse some of the epub subdirectories it can take up to 30 minutes to retrieve the directories, that is if you are lucky as sometimes it just leave the finder on my Mac hanging.
The thing is, you are totally safe if you don’t wander into those humongous directories of 150,000 entries.However, today, right at the get go, after establishing a mapped network drive, you can feel the sluggishness of even just browsing the root directory of 10 folders.
Attempting to copy to or from the Passport results in a 11 minute estimated copy time of an 800MB file.
The Solution:
After an exhaustive testing of mapping/un-mapping/rebooting and so forth, I finally decided to just mount the USB drive on the My Cloud and just leave it to connect for a half hour or more. The media scan is, of course, OFF but the attached drive just seem to be spinning, meaning that the My Cloud, is probably doing something which was the reason that I decided to just let the My Cloud do its thing.
and finally, Instead of connecting via SMB, I connected via AFP and… that seemed to be the solution!!
speed is back to normal at about 80MB/s read and writes… Yay!! what a relief!!
…
wait…
I just re-mapped the USB drive as SMB… and … it is also giving me 80MB/s read/writes.
So I’m thinking that if you connect a file laden USB drive to your My Cloud, give it time to buffer itself? or is it Apple that needs time to fill its buffers?
There goes my morning… !@#$%
Addendum:
I have two Passport drives and the difference is noted below:
- one is filled with Movies at which if you attach it to a My Cloud, it attaches favourably without any speed difference.
- second one is filled with a quarter million midi file types, pdfs sheet music, epubs, photos, extremely large photos (panoramas by stitching 100 of photos together) and much much more.
For the second Passport drive to work normally, it needs to be attached and left alone for the My Cloud to scan and probably index the whole drive which is a very long process as even pulling up the directories of any subdirectory like my ebook subdirectory can take up to 30 minutes in SMB but a couple of minutes in AFP.
To resolve this, I’ll repeat myself, just plug in the USB drive and let it sit until all activity on the drive itself has settle down.
