How does the data being transferred flow?

So my question is kind of a 2 part question. I have an OLD laptop at home and a bunch of hard drives I want to transfer data to the WD Mirror. The transfer speed from the laptop is slow, but likely because of how old it is. I am plugging the external hard drives into a dock that is plugged into the WD Mirror’s USB Port. The question(s) are these. When I connect FROM my old laptop to the WD Mirror and One of the External Drives that is docked and using the USB of the WD Drive, and I drag and drop files from the External Drive to the WD, does the data flow BACK to my laptop and then to the WD or is it smart enough to pass it from the WD’s USB port straight to the WD?. The second part of the question is kind of the same question. If I connect to the WD from my office using the cloud, and I initiate a transfer from an external HD plugged into the WD to the WD - will it transfer the data to my remote location first and them back to the WD - chewing up lots of bandwidth, or am I just seeing a graphical representation on my end of the transfer? I hope these make sense. Thank you in advance for any help you can provide.

If you’re using Windows Explorer (or equivalent) then it’s going MCM → Laptop → Hard drive, so making two trips via your network connections (plus your laptop’s CPU). It’s basically the slowest route that you could use, especially given the age of your laptop (and doubly-so if you’re using wifi).

There are three other options you could also use:

  1. Connect to the MCM dashboard via your web browser, and make the transfer via the built-in file viewer. It’s ok for a few files or folders, but isn’t really good enough for a bulk transfer.

  2. Connect to the MCM via SSH and use the command-line to do the transfer (using rsync for example). A much better way to do it, but takes some knowledge of Linux (you need to enable and use SSH and be comfortable with the command line and navigating around a Linux file tree).

  3. Connect your MCM directly to your laptop via the Ethernet cable (plug one end into your laptop and the other into the MCM), with the hard drive connected to a USB port on your laptop too.

In the latter case the MCM should still appear under the network section in Windows (or the equivalent if you’re using a different OS) and you can then drag and drop using Windows Explorer like before, but it should save some network lag and traffic due to the direct cable connection between the laptop and the MCM.

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@DarrenHill - Thank you very much for the thorough explanation and quick response. Based on the performance I was getting, I pretty much assumed that was the case. Thank you again. I hope you have a great day!