Dismally slow transfer speeds and for populating content

WD Legacy Products My Book Live Duo
1

I’ve been setting my 6T LiveDuo for the past week. It’s taken that long largely due to the dismally slow transfer speeds of this product, and which have nothing to do with my 40 MBit/s connection, nor with my top of the line iMac.

I was transfering the content of my iTunes library from my 1T external hard drive to the 6T LiveDuo, which allegedly would take a whopping 22 Hrs to transfer (my library was only 250G), when the transfer stopped. I relaunched the finder on my iMac to stop the transfer, and suddenly ALL the contents that I had transfered up until now to the LiveDuo were GONE !!

I have restarted the computer, restarted the LiveDuo, and it is slowly repopulating the list of contents. 

The fact that the transfer speeds are so ridiculously slow and that a simple relaunching of the finder would whipe out access to the contents of the LiveDuo is RIDICULOUS and UNACCEPTABLE for a product that is worth over $400 !

What is / could be the source of this problems?

2

This is an inherent problem with a “network access only” drive.  With an 100Mbs ethernet connection through the router, the best transfer time you can get for 250Gb is 250,000 x 8 / 100 = 20,000 seconds or 5hrs and 33 minutes (the 8 factor accounts for bytes to bits).  That does not factor in the overhead of transmission (error checking, etc.)  Of course, you could use a 1Gb connection/router and divide that by 10 (in theory), or use your USB connection (not sure of the net effect).  Or a wifi connection - now we are talking slow.

The first back up is pretty bad, no matter what.  There are products on the market that, in addition to the ethernet connection offer a USB one, bypassing the router for that first backup…

3

Have a look at this:

http://community.wdc.com/t5/My-Book-Live-Duo/Performance-problems-Read-this-first/td-p/458792