Hi!
I recently bought a Western Digital My Book Live 2TB. I sat down, installed the software and began to copy my files from my PC to my new MBL.
To my surprise, I only got a writing speed of about 2mb/s. That meant that it would take approx. 140 hours to transfer my 1TB of files. In addition to this, I only got a reading speed of less than 2 mb/s, sometimes even less than 1 mb/s. This seems a bit strange to me, as I had expected somewhere around 60 mb/s.
With these horrible speeds, I can’t stream my 720p movies from my new MBL, as the speed just isn’t sufficent. Therefore, my new product, which I paid $400 for is useless…
I have no chance of returning it, as I bought it online - and live in Norway, so I have to try to fix it.
This is the setup I am using at the moment, to transfer my files:
I have a Gigabit switch (which is not connected to my internet at the moment), which I have my MBL and PC connected to. My PC supports Gigabit ethernet and I have it switched on.
My MBL link LED is yellow, showing no Gigabit activity. Still, I had not expected to get a reading speed of 1 mb/s…
What am I doing wrong?
Hi there, are you sure you don’t have a bottleneck on your layout? A switch will never be as good as a router and you also have to consider if the bandwidth is being limited by a firewall, ports an IP negotiation on the network…
Try different settings and even try to connect the MBL directly to the Ethernet port of your computer to test if it has a better performance…
ThePizzaMatrix wrote:
A switch will never be as good as a router
Horsey-poo! :stuck_out_tongue: The ports on the back of these home broadband routers are actually just a simple switch.
I can’t connect my MBL to my computer. Once I connect the ethernet cable from my MBL to my PC, the LED on my MBL goes red and neither my computer nor WD SmartWare can detect the unit.
Home broadband devices do not deserve to be called routers by me 
EirikYeah wrote:
My MBL link LED is yellow, showing no Gigabit activity. Still, I had not expected to get a reading speed of 1 mb/s…
What am I doing wrong?
My MBL is connected to a GbE router and I get speeds greater than 40MB/sec.
How old is the network cable you’re using? Can you try another?
EirikYeah wrote:
I can’t connect my MBL to my computer. Once I connect the ethernet cable from my MBL to my PC, the LED on my MBL goes red and neither my computer nor WD SmartWare can detect the unit.
You can’t do that and expect it to work…
If you’re going to connect it to the PC with no intermediate device, you’ll have to give BOTH a STATIC IP address. You may also have to use a CROSSOVER ethernet cable.
The RED LED means that the the MBL was unable to detect a valid network.
I’ve read WD support on here claiming that no crossover is needed, the unit will recognize and switch over.
I don’t know about the IP thing, but that makes sense.
