Frustration! (place dirty word here)

The first MBLD I got was broken out of the box. After a couple of week I got this new one. It’s spattered with problems.

  1. Why is it so slow? I know everybody is having this problem but here’s the deal: next to my MBLD is my old MBL with an identical setup (and content) and it’s working just fine. Accessing the MBLD in Finder (os x) is slow. Reading (streaming) from MBLD is slow. Writing is slow. Using the browser UI is slow. All this compared to my MBL, that is so don’t tell me there’s just something wrong with my network.

  2. MBLD is not showing in the WD Quick View in the menu bar. Sure, this is just a minor inconvenience BUT a sign of something being wrong!!!

  3. Green light blinking all the time! Drive buzzing and working all the time! I’ve had this frive for a couple of weeks now and it hasn’t slept for a second. The internal drives haven’t stopped, ever! What is it doing?

  4. Why are the folders in the public/shared videos write protected? I didn’t do it! How do I unlock them? I just copied the content from MBL to MBLD and the folders on MBL are not locked…

So to sum it up, why does my MBL work so nicely while this MBLD is piece of… you know!?

  1. Why is it so slow?

Are you running it on Raid0 or Raid1? The MBLD has more capacity and offering for Raid1… I dodn’t know whether the MBL has this capability as well. Anyway you get a significant performance drawback when you run it with Raid1 because of the mirroring operations that has always to be performed. This is the trade off for more safety.

  1. Green light blinking all the time! Drive buzzing and working all the time!

I recognized that there is a cronjob running on the MBLD every 2 minutes (/etc/cron.d/access). It has something to do with the media server and dlna devices that might connect to the machine - it copies some files and runs a script that seems to check for new clients. BTW, it also spams with email around when you enable sendmail. I got my MBLD sleeping much mor regularly by setting this cronjob to run every hour instead of every 2 minutes (you just need to be aware, that a new media device will not be recognized immediately, but that’s okay for me).

However, it still wakes up once every hour as it seems, and stays awake for half an hour… as far as I observed. So it’s still not perfect - I will need to dig in that deeper, when I have time.

  1. Why are the folders in the public/shared videos write protected? I didn’t do it! How do I unlock them? I just

copied the content from MBL to MBLD and the folders on MBL are not locked…

That could be due to wrong ownership. The users and groups of your old MBL are not known to the new ones, so if you copy files between the two, they *might* get assigned an arbitrary and wrong uid/gid on your new device. You can find that out by ssh’ing into your MBLD and do “ls -la” on the files in question - if you see funny numbers instead of a user- and group name, this is likely the reason. Then you need to “chmod” the files to fix ownership.

Regards

No, screw it!

I decided I’d have my last fight with MBLD today and unfortunately I lost miserably…

Nothing helps. Nothing works. This product is, yes I’ll say it here, a piece of **bleep**! How the WD guys made a good product like MBL and then messed up so perfectly with MBLD is so beyond me. If you say that I have to take a performance hit with having a secure setup with raid1 then all I can say is no. Just no, that’s completely unacceptable. This thing is so slow it’s practically useless for modern applications. I just can’t recommend MBLD to anyone who actually wants to use it. Maybe 15 ago it would have been hot **bleep** so c’mon WD, really?! Even the browser UI is painfully slow. Seriously, guys?! And it’s not my network, MBL is running circles around MBLD in this same network.

And reading this forum makes me think I’m not alone. A lot of people bought a piece of **bleep**. This leaves me wondering if WD is laughing their asses off or if they’re panicing because they unleashed a turd and can’t clean up the mess.

So all this gives me only one option: anyone wanna buy a great network drive?! :wink:

Well, I am quite happy with the MBLD :wink:. I use it to collect emails from all my different freemail accounts into a single imap server and as backup drive for TimeMachine. The latter works out of the box, the first needs some… let’s say “tweaking” and debian experience. Next I will also install owncloud on it and use it as (kindof dropbox) sync cloud. Media streaming is not on my list so far.

All in all it’s perfectly suited for all things that I want to use it for - and I love the fact that you can ssh into it and have a standard debian os on it, which is just a little bit customized :smiley:. I just need to figure out, how to switch of this media streaming thing for now, since I *think* that this keeps the MBLD from regular standby mode…

If you say that I have to take a performance hit with having a secure setup with raid1 then all I can say is no

Do you have Raid1 on your old MBL? The MBLD has two hard disks and Raid1 is mirroring the two. If one of the disks breaks down, you can restore system and data from the other. You can also run it on Raid0, which makes it faster - but if only *one* of the disks breaks down, your system and data will be lost . On the other hand you have the whole capacity (4 resp 6 TB) and no performance dropdown for rw operations… So, you CAN go for Raid0, but it’s advisable to have a backup in place.

No, MBL only has one disk so there’s no option for raid. That was the whole point of buying MBLD; to have a secure rig so data can be recovered if 1 disc breaks down. But to have a tremendous cut in performance because of this… there’s just no way to justify it! And the poor UI performance? Because of raid1? Really!? And all the other stuff I mentioned?

No, my guess is that WD cut corners to bring down the price and the components just aren’t cut out to give the kind of performance you’d expect. Or maybe they have some other fundamental problem with software, not sure but this was my last WD product. That I know for sure. I can only hope I’ll be able to sell it to some other poor ■■■■■■ to get some of my money back…

Put some numbers to this, please …

What kind of performance are you seeing?

I just copied an 8GB ISO file from my MBLD to my desktop in 1m47s which equates to ~600 megbit per second copy…

That’s pretty fast for a NAS of this class…  

As for writes, copying the same ISO back to the MBLD took 2m41sec, or 397 megabits per second.   Also pretty good for RAID.

I’m not bothered by a modestly-paced UI…  I’m only in there once in a month or so when making changes – it doesn’t need to be a speed-demon on the UI.

The only issues I have with the MBLD are DLNA-related, and that’s a common issue that WD is declaring major success in a firmware update expected in January (in another thread.)

I think you are right! Have same problems and more.

Performance could be a bit lower when writing. This peace of ***** has the same performance when you are reading.

It is’nt capable of doing anything with a normal performance.

I wonder if you are having also problems with DLNA.

It’s really hard to give even an approx number since opening a directory can take up to 5 minutes or so. But once I get a transfer started it’s somewhere around 1 MB/sec, occasinal peaks at 2. Sure, this is on wifi but still not so good. Using a powerline network adapter gives similar results so this gives me the impression it’s not about the network especially when, like mentioned, MBL runs circles around MBLD.

The biggest problem is not the sluggish UI, the problem is the sluggish everything.

But if there is a big update coming I might wait untill January and see what happens, if anything…

5 minutes to open a directory?   WOW.   Never seen it take more than a second or two.

Is there a possibility you’re connecting via WebDAV accidentally instead of Microsoft Network?

check this:

http://community.wdc.com/t5/My-Book-Live/WebDAV-FAQ/td-p/463854

I’m using a Mac.

Ah.

Are you connecting via AFP or SMB?

Out of curiosity, what if you turn off netatalk and see what happens?

NAS:/# /etc/init.d/netatalk stop
Stopping Netatalk Daemons: afpd cnid_metad papd timelord atalkd.
NAS:/#

Ah.

Are you connecting via AFP or SMB?

 

Well, since I’m no expert I’ll have to ask: how do I know which one I’m using and how do I change from one to the other? I’m just using Finder.

 

 

_ Out of curiosity, what if you turn off netatalk and see what happens? _

_   _

You lost me at netatalk. What do you want me to do? And how do I switch it back if something goes wrong?

Out of curiosity, what if you turn off netatalk and see what happens?

What happens is, that TimeMachine Backups are no longer working. But indeed, large TM backups (20-30GB or more) takes ages… would there be a way to do them on a samba share? And if so, would it help?

Not to say that the MBLD doesn’t have its faults but taking 5 minutes to open a directory my indicate other problems. How is the health of your computer?

Well, let’s just say that with my MBL opening directories works just fine, no problem… So it may not be trouble at my computer’s end.

Please try the followings and let us know the result:

With the help of the web UI:

  1. Disable DLNA

  2. Disable Itunes Server

  3. Disable ftp

Power OFF and ON the MBLD unit. Try to copy data from your computer to the unit and back to the computer.

Is it still slow?

I tried your advice @Joke71 - didn’t seem to help. Tested a 735MB file into and off the MBLD - took about 90 seconds before and after the changes. Including a reboot of the Duo. I have had the exact same frustrations as “Serious_Damage”. My player is the Samsung BD-D8900A.