Estimate read/write speed?

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
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Hi everyone.

I’ve been looking at the My Cloud for a while now, and it will be my first Network Harddrive.

It got all the features I need, but my only concern is the transfer rate.

Can somone give me an estimate of how fast it can transfer files over wifi?

Wireless speed.png
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AFAIK you can transfer files over wifi @ 1-2 mbps . Will post pics from my transfer shortly

https://www.dropbox.com/s/gigmdd9huzewgl5/2014-03-28-20-53-10.png - 2.4 Ghz - sitting right next to the wifi router

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ps3167xfp9vsjwj/2014-03-28-20-54-00.png - 2.4 Ghz - sitting 2 rooms away from the router

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8mlm3asmqrqfily/2014-03-28-20-55-14.png 5 Ghz - sitting 2 rooms away from the router

Copying a 925 mb file from my could to my LG G2 LS 980 Phone

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Your Wifi speeds will vary with your distance and your interference, but according to your connection status, your wifi speed is estimated to be about 65Mbs which is about 8MB/s. 

So if you have a 700 MB movie file, it will take about a minute and half to transfer to or from the cloud. Read and write speed should be pretty much the same.

If you are connected via a gigabit cable, your speeds will be around 45MB/s writes and 75MB/s reads, translating to about 15-20 seconds to write a 700MB movie file and about 10 seconds to read it back.

Remember that your wifi speeds has nothing to do with the MyCloud as this will remain constant with any Network storage device.

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Ralphael , i would like to disagree, it will tak much more than 1 or 2 mins. It does not work that way in real time.

I would like the OP , Xairaz to try it and post the results for every ones curiosity and satisfaction

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chetan_shah wrote:

Ralphael , i would like to disagree, it will tak much more than 1 or 2 mins. It does not work that way in real time.

 

I would like the OP , Xairaz to try it and post the results for every ones curiosity and satisfaction

What I have said is not an opinion nor a therectical max speed of WIFI’s… Your own WIFI speed test will vary with the distance, the interference and whether you have your router set to both G/N or strictly N.

My own Wifi N test is 85 seconds to copy a 733MB file to and from the WD Cloud giving me 8.6MB/s which is standard for real world WIFI. 

Lastly, this speed has nothing to do with the performance of the Cloud regardless as Xairaz will get this exact same speed with any NAS device due to their WIFI configuration.

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Thanks for the feedback.

I don’t know when I will purchase My Cloud, but when I do, I’ll be sure to post my results.

I have never messed around with the ports on my router, so heres a newb question for you.

I got this router http://inglong.en.alibaba.com/product/684250469-214504406/Thomson_TG789vn_Wireless_n_VoIP_Ultra_Broadband_Gateway_TG789.html

Does it have a gigabit ethernet port? All I see is WAN and LAN ports, and I don’t know much about this.

EDIT: Oh, almost forgot. If I connect an external harddrive at the USB port, will the files on the external harddrive read/write just as well as on the My Cloud itself ?

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Like the poster above, it depends on your wireless network and what WiFI technology is being used and then how far you away from your access point and what building material could be in your way.

Do you have B, G, N or faster? The faster the speeds the shorter the distance it will go as well. Are you going to be separated by a floor? IS the floor wood or concrete? Are you going to be in another room? Is the room separated by a wood frame wall or a metal framed wall?

If you are transfering Gigabytes upon Gigabytes it wil take a while over WiFi, I’d recommend (if you can) attach the MyCloud to a Gigabit port in a switch/router and connecting over the wired network.

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I have never messed around with the ports on my router, so heres a newb question for you.

I got this router http://inglong.en.alibaba.com/product/684250469-214504406/Thomson_TG789vn_Wireless_n_VoIP_Ultra_Broadband_Gateway_TG789.html

Does it have a gigabit ethernet port? All I see is WAN and LAN ports, and I don’t know much about this.

 

EDIT: Oh, almost forgot. If I connect an external harddrive at the USB port, will the files on the external harddrive read/write just as well as on the My Cloud itself ?

 

 

That router you you have, hsa a Gigabit on the WAN side but the 4-ethernet ports on the LAN side are 10/100.

The USB on the back of the MyCloud is USB 3.0 so if you’re external drive is USB3.0 you’re golden! USB2.0 will be slower than the drive that is inside.

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@Xairaz

that router is only a 10/100 internal so you won’t get the gigabit speeds locally;  also your computer has to have a gigabit ethernet port also.

In answer to your USB connected drive speeds, it will remain the same speeds as your Cloud drive even if you use a USB 2 device  since the limitation is the WIFI speed.  

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Ralphael wrote:

@Xairaz

 

that router is only a 10/100 internal so you won’t get the gigabit speeds locally;  also your computer has to have a gigabit ethernet port also.

 

Alright thanks.

One last question then.

If I connect the Cloud with the 10/100 ethernet port, what will the estimated speed be compared to a gigabit port?

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I have a recent Mac (2012) and have 24 Gig of Ram, I have a gigabit router and so far it has has taken a week of continually being connected to transfer 867 gig of data…it is that slow it is painful…to be honest I would look elsewhere if you want fast data transfer as you are not going to get it on this drive!

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Xairaz wrote:

Alright thanks.

One last question then.

If I connect the Cloud with the 10/100 ethernet port, what will the estimated speed be compared to a gigabit port?

your 10/100 port is about the same as your WIFI with a theorectical max of 12MB/s but real world speeds around 8-10MB/s.

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Visionofyou wrote:

I have a recent Mac (2012) and have 24 Gig of Ram, I have a gigabit router and so far it has has taken a week of continually being connected to transfer 867 gig of data…it is that slow it is painful…to be honest I would look elsewhere if you want fast data transfer as you are not going to get it on this drive!

@Visionofyou, 

The network speed that you are getting, which is really slow, has nothing to do with the MyCloud device. Although the device may have many flaws, network speeds is not one of the flaws. This is like saying my porshe (well maybe a smart car) can’t go faster the 20mph in a school zone, so don’t get this car.

For anyone reading this… rest assure that your MyCloud is fast on a gigabit network. If you are having network speed problems, this is a factor of your network, your router, your WIFI, your computer and everything else except the MyCloud. In other words, you will get the same network performance problems whether you bought a QNap, Seagate etc.

for more references see

before you pack up your WD and return it, let’s talk about Copying Speeds!

1 Like
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Thanks for all the responses, now I know what I can expect.

Very usefull info :slight_smile:

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I have read your article and have actually followed all the information in it, which was very useful.

The mac has the gigabit card, 1000baseT as you have stated. The WD is set to not go to sleep, the drive is mapped as you say. My home network is set up thus… I have fibre optic broadband and average around 70 Mb/s download, this then is connected via gigabit cable to my gigabit hub. This then splits to the mac and to the WD.

All drives that are connected externally are either via USB3 or Thunderbolt.

The data transfer speed is shockingly bad, customer services at WD advised me to reset the WD which I did…and so a week later I am still patiently waiting for it to back the data up… I will stick with my comment that it is a very slow network drive. I have an old WD MyBook also on the same router and that is actually faster!

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Hello Visionofyou, 

Is that a MyBook Live?  

A valid test is not a data backup process.  

First of all what software are you using to backup? if you are using timemachine, make sure you connect via AFP://WDMyCloud.local. 

Secondly, all backup software are intrinsically slow for the fact that you have varying sizes of files (All small files will slow down any copy speeds) and the fact that backup is suppose to be a non-invasive process (ie. works in the background). 

 So before we trace down why your backups are so slow… find out if you are really at gigabit speeds.

Gigabit Testing

One of the nice thing about the Cloud device is that you can actually directly connect the device via ethernet to your mac ethernet. This bypasses the router to enable you to test. This is one way.

Or eliminate all devices from the router except your Mac and the WD Cloud device.

Find a file approximately 700MB in size. Writing to the Cloud device should give a result of about 15-20 seconds to copy this file over and to copy it back should be approximately 10 seconds ±5 seconds. This is the ball park timing for gigabit speeds.

If you are getting minutes, then you have to identify which part of the network is holding you back. You can try directly plugging the device from etherport to etherport which eliminates the router to see if that works…

If the router test is successful, plug in other devices to see if that slows down your network.

Remember one thing, the mac allows both the wifi and ethernet to be both on simultaneously. Make sure you turn off the WIFI, otherwise your testing may be skewed by the WIFI settings.

Getting Gigabit speeds on your network is independant of the backup speed as backup has it own speed problems including organization, fragmented writes and packaging; mainly due to the large number of small files that the backup process has to keep track of. 

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Hey Ralphael,

I have a lot more fun for you to play with. To check your Gigabit speeds. And you can do different sizes of creating a file to copy and delete straight after that.

Check this out  http://www.totusoft.com/lanspeed1.html

Download it and have fun,

You like, then gimme a Kudo :wink:

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