I’m considering purchasing a My Cloud device and I read that I can enable SSH/shell access with relative ease.
What I will like to know is how easy would it be then to have My Cloud copy about 625 GB of data from my existing NAS (DLink DNS 323, if it matters) into itself? I don’t really care about the file ownership and what not, as long as I can the data migrated that’ll be good. The desired solution I am looking for is that I can simply tell My Cloud to copy the data over directly, and I can leave both devices on their own for a couple of hours to complete the transfer.
Rsync, or recursive scp? Or some other utilities?
Oh, and when I map my existing NAS, I need to provide a username and password. I’m guessing the connection string will be something like username@current_nas, and then I’ll be prompted for the password?
Try to copy it first all data back to your HDD on a PC or an USB 3.0 drive connected to the PC and then after that from the PC directly to the WDMC. You can use all kinds of backup programs for that. The WD Smartware, PureSync, Paragon Backup, Easeus backup, AOMEI Backup, etc. http://www.techradar.com/news/software/applications/best-free-backup-software-11-programs-we-recommend-1137924 But in principle you should have everything on some PC (s) already. So leave the Dlink and Copy from fresh to the WDMC.
Thanks for the suggestion but I will really not prefer to spend a considerable amount of time to transfer 625 GB of data into my laptop first (which BTW only has a 256 GB SSD) and then more time to transfer them out to the My Cloud device - that’s shifting 1.25 TB of data in much more time than My Cloud needs if it can copy the data directly.
On that note, I’m also not looking to map both network drives and use my laptop as a conduit… even if Windows is smart enough to reduce the amount of data that hits my laptop (disk or memory) first before going out to the My Cloud device, my laptop will have to be running throughout the whole time. That is quite a redundant step and involvement.
I doubt there’s any consumer-grade single-drive HDD NAS that can fully saturate a Gigabit connection.
The HDDs in my existing NAS are old and slow already, I think the average read speed will be about 20 MB/s. That means it can take anywhere between 8 to 10 hours, if not more, to complete the transfer.
Hence the search for a NAS-to-NAS direct option. I’m still surprised that most NAS models regardless of manufacturer doesn’t make this kind of data migration easy.
The easiest way to transfer without ssh / command line is using the WD My Cloud Desktop App, its like a file explorer for your WD drives. If you transfer files and exit the program, it will still transfer files in the background
a brand new Cisco EA6500 router with GB Ethernet and 201.11/n wifi
a 2 yo HP EliteBook laptop with GB Ethernet and 201.11/n wifi
an older Dlink DNS-321 2x1.5tb NAS
One big file transfer from the Pc to the WDMC reaches about 60MB/s
Transferring files from the DNS-321 to the WDMC via the Pc run at less than 1MB/s
Backing up the Pc into the WDMC **even via ethernet** is extremely slow too. It would take 3 full days to copy My Documents.
This is really disappointing.
The alternatives I have tried :
(need help for this) I can ssh into the WDMC but have not found the way to reach the DNS-321 from there … does anyone know how to do that ?
(bugged by a fault in the WDMC) my Pc backup is on a portable USB3 WD Passport drive. I can connect that into the WDMC and, **in theory**, copy its contents from ssh prompt with “cp -r /shares/My_Passport//*” OR use the WD My Cloud desktop application to direct transfer files. But :: the WDMC gets very funny as soon as I connect the USB drive into it, the ssh CLI is slooow or not responsive at all, it goes offline, the drive is not accessible anymore from the Pc, the WDMC desktop app cannot connect to it, etc. (This is the problem I am first looking to find a solution for here …)
(working decently) I have connected the WDMC directly into the Pc ethernet port : setting the WDMC and the Pc to static IP address ; the IP address of the Pc is the Gateway of the WDMC and the IP address of the WDMC is the Gateway of the Pc. Like this, I could mount the WDMC drive into the Pc as \<user> and I can reach ~20MB/s rate. This works only between Pc and WDMC, thought, not from the DNS-321 …
[edit] Finally, even the direct ethernet connection ends up being awfully slow : less than 1MB/s …
Your bottlenect is the Dlink DNS-321 NAS as I remember buying that a few years ago then returning it. Although it says it has a gigabit ethernet connection, it is really a very slow NAS. If I remember correctly, the read and write speed of that is somewhere in the neighborhood of 6MB/s.
Also connecting the DLink to the router may slow the whole router down as the router will only go as fast as the slowest device, in other words your new real Gigabit Cloud may be slowed to the speeds of your Dlink NAS.
So start testing the speeds individually to see what you get by copying a very large file preferably around 500MB to 1GB.
Copy from your NAS to your PC… Note the speed
then unhook all devices except your pc to your cloud
then copy from your pc to the cloud. note the speed
Now connect the dlink to the router
copy from your pc to the cloud again, note the speed
If the speed is slower, then the dlink has in fact slowed down your connection then you might have to figure an intermediate storage solution; ie. copying from the Dlink NAS to a USB 3.0 or USB 2.0 drive.
Then copy from your USB 2.0 drive to the Cloud.
The speeds from your PC to the Cloud should be in the neighborhood of 40-45MB/s for files greater then 500MB but if you are copying from a USB 2.0 device, then you would get less. Remember there are therectical speeds and real speeds.
I just remember a program that I used backed in 1995, although you will have to look for a more recent program; just search for FXP which basically allows you to ftp from one device to another ftp. However both devices must accept the fxp protocol, so this is something you have to look into.
If you are able to find a fxp program, the practicality is that once you set up the ftp process between the two devices, your computer doesn’t have to be involved.
Just an update… I bought the 3 TB MyCloud in the end. Taking a calculated risk by disclosing here, but anyways I enabled SSH access, mounted my current NAS and copied the data over using the cp command. I then unmounted it and disabled SSH access again. I hope this is still within the normal operation of the NAS, as the only remotely unorthodox operation is the mounting.
No actual timing but since I didn’t copy with preserved timestamps (and I should have, for sentimental reasons), I can estimate the copying speed to be about 17.7 MB per second, or 1.06 GB per minute, or all-in-all 10 hours to copy almost 640 GB of data. Pretty decent considering that’s probably the max read speed those 6-year-old HDDs can muster now, more importantly I did achieve my original aim of a simple NAS-to-NAS migration.
Hopefully this 3 TB NAS can last at least the next 6 years!
I mounted it as cifs, and I said 17.7 MB/s is pretty reasonable since I don’t recall I ever had faster read/write speeds from the old NAS… come and think of it, maybe it’s more to do with the NAS hardware than the disks?
I just tested MyCloud with a simple 485 MB file transfer to and from a RAM disk on my laptop. I get close to 60 MB/s both ways over a Gigabit ethernet connection. This is a significant upgrade for me.
