The number one complaint about the My Cloud Home (MCH) is the slow speed of the proprietary KDDFS based ‘Private User Space’ which is the online shareable space that is distinct from the ‘LAN Public share’ which is SMB based and accessible at high speed and not dependent on the internet. The actual speed of copying using Windows Explorer or a common file sync program such as Freefilesync to the Private space is actually much lower than than anyone has reported - it is actually less than 0.7 MBps for small files such as common JPG and PDF files even when the connection to the MCH is local to the LAN.
In order to reliably copy with good speed to the private space, try a file copy software such as Teracopy which now supports 7z compression of a source folder to a destination zip file in one operation. Teracopy, with Windows Explorer integration can now copy a source folder to the destination and paste into a destination zip file, in the following example, a folder with 930 files (645 MB) was compressed and copied to the MCH private space in about 25 seconds at 31 MBps. The 7zip menu option of Teracopy is not available if 7zip is not installed. See post #4 below for the -mx0 switch to increase copy throughput to 76 MBps.
Compression to a zip file is not always the ideal way of storage because it is less convenient to access or sync the files as zip files*, but it is probably the best performance you are going to get until WD allows higher speeds of file operation to the KDDFS. Even if you choose not to use compression, Teracopy is still the better choice when you have to copy a lot of small files to the MCH private space. Using Teracopy, the copy speed increased more than 6 times, from 0.7 MBps using Freefilesync to 4.5 MBps using Teracopy; Freefilesync is in itself already 10% faster than Windows Explorer and Synctoy.
Teracopy and 7zip will automatically update the zip file with any new and updated files from the source folder if you repeat the copy and paste-to-zip destination operation.
An honorable mention should be given to a free and fast folder sync software by Demio Software called DSynchronize which is not only a portable, small and powerful file synchronization utility but also has a built in scheduler and timer based synchronization. DSynchronize is capable of 1.7 MBps to KDDFS which is clearly not as fast as Teracopy (4.5 MBps) but it is more than twice as fast as Freefilesync and other sync software.
DSynchronize is also capable of real time synchronize of two or more folders on Hard Disk, Floppy Disk, LAN, USB Key, CD-DVD (with packet writing software) and FTP server. This means that it could sync from your MCH private user (‘online’ KDDFS) to a SSD on the PC in a real time monitoring of changes in the folders. Just select the folder pair(s) and tick the ‘Realtime sync’ checkbox. The syncing is now active, and all changes from the left side folder will be copied across to the right side folder and this sync can be run as a service for the next time this setting is in effect and run on Windows start up. There are other free software that can do this of course, but you would end up spending a lot more time setting it up.
A question of speed and security. MCH users may notice that not only does it take a long time to copy files to the ‘Private User Space’, it also takes a long time to delete files from it using the desktop Windows Explorer (KDDFS running on the desktop must be checking with other online shared mobile devices to be sure the file is not locked in usage) - on the order of about 3 files deletions per second. That could be a problem if you are working with thousands or tens of thousands of files.
The credit goes to a user named Gas920 who suggested using the mobile app (but it also works as fast with the web app in a browser) to delete the files. The deletion of a folder with thousands of files from the mobile app is nearly instant but the files are also irretrievable once deleted. Because WD MCH is a one way sync, from mobile ->desktop KDDFS, it doesn’t check if such files are in use on the desktop and in fact the mobile app will delete files that was opened on the desktop after they have been subsequently closed on the desktop without giving a warning on the mobile app that files were opened for editing.
The original post on top showed you how to increase copy speed of small files to the shareable ‘Private user’ space from 0.7 to 30 MBps. This post will show you how to increase that from 0.7 to ~76 MBps; even though the progress bar showed 97 MB/s, the final speed measured for the entire operation was about 76 MBps.
You can accomplish this by including the 7zip -mx0 switch option in the Teracopy menu when you edit the PasteMenu.ini file with notepad. The Teracopy paste menu to 7zip is only available after you have installed 7zip, then install Teracopy then copy a source folder and paste to a destination. Since we are more concern about copy speed to the apparently slow KDDFS file system of the ‘Private’ space, we use the -mx0 option to turn off the compression, the end user can vary the compression ratio to optimize their time and space requirements.
The easiest way to browse within a zip container on the My Cloud Home is to use something like TreeSize Free to browse the tree structure and MaxView Shareware ($20 lifetime) allows browsing within zip and 7-zip archive directly. This is the realtime loading and browsing of about 600 pictures in a zip container directly on a local MCH private space.
