Live Duo woes - slow transfer and rebuild

WD Legacy Products My Book Live Duo
1

I bought one yesterday.

I’m impressed by various things - looks, price, build quality, quick set-up. And unimpressed by very slow and variable speeds.

On set-up, I read the ‘Mirroring the drives and it can take several hours. The RAID is operational.’ message and began transferring files.

Having loaded less than 200gb, transfer times slowed dramatically - and are highly variable.

I’m aware that speed can depends on the quantity of files and their sizes, but the difference seems crazy… if the transfer bars on my Mac are to be believed, then it’s 3gb per minute down to 3 minutes per 500meg - and often the ‘x seconds remaining’ is more like ‘x MINUTES’. It doesn’t seem to vary much whether using wireless or ethernet-connecting my Mac(s) and the LD.

I’ve aborted some transfers as it was wanting 5 hours for 23gb.

I spoke with support and was told ‘Slow… what did you expect?’

‘Not this. There’s nothing about it in the pre-sales docs and I haven’t seen it in the user guide either (but may have missed something).’

Having read this forum, I see others have similar issues.

‘Rebuilding’ is currently 35% - after 35 hours… it’s progressed from 34% in the past 5 hours.

Support suggest I do a reset - but of course I need to get some of my files off first - and transfer speeds are equally slow, and when selecting a bunch of files for transfer it takes a long time (many seconds) to highlight them and then many minutes of ‘preparing for transfer’ before anything moves.

Opening a directory to see the contents is also very slow and things are generally unresponsive. On switching back to work with my other WDC external drives, the difference is dramatically noticeable. On them I can grab a bunch of files and drag across, then repeat several times and the progress bars quickly catch-up and show reasonable times - unlike the LD where anything more than about three queued seems to hang the transfer.

I’ve used WDC external drives for years and I’ll still keep using them because they’re usually well made, easy to use, reliable and well-priced.

But this issue is troubling me.

2

It is VERY variable when the RAID is building.  It took mine about 36 hours total, and I wasn’t using it at all during that time.

3

Thanks.

Was there much stuff on it during the rebuild?

Although I’ve not yet read the whole thing, I’ve not seen this issue mentioned in the accompanying docs - it certainly isn’t prominent.

**bleep**, I’m tempted to return this and buy some normal WDC external drives.

4

UPDATE to that previous post…

The ‘bleep’ wasn’t mine - so likely it was moderated. I think I’d used ‘a word that begins with h and sounds like bell’.

Stuff like that makes me even more likely to switch away from WDC.

5

Ok, here’s what’s hopefully the last from me on this…

I had two PMs from support, offering assistance. This pleases me.

During the night, the rebuilding completed and the thing is now much more responsive - doesn’t hang when selecting a group of files for transfer. Again, this pleases me.

Speeds are faster too - although they’re maybe not as fast as expected… when the Duo is connected by ethernet to my Mac, transfers seem to be only about 30% faster than to/from a USB2 MyBook. I don’t know enough to assess if this is as it should be. (And to be honest, I’m fed-up and don’t want to waste further time and energy - I just want to use it.)

One of my gripes is that the pre-sales docs and user guide didn’t appear to mention the likely slow/variable performance whilst rebuilding, qualifying that with an ‘! may have missed something.’ Having relooked, I hadn’t missed anything - there’s no mention of what’s clearly not an isolated issue. Not good.

Had there been a simple mention of ‘performance may be slow/variable whilst rebuilding’ I’d not have had these issues. And the ‘could take 5 hours’ message in the dashboard was waaaaay off - by about 30-40 hours.

Overall, it’s tainted the experience. And needlessly.

Beyond that… as others in this forum raise concerns on performance, and seem to do so with a level of expertise much greater than mine, I’m not sure that there isn’t a genuine longer-term issue regarding the suitability of this machine. But right now, that’s beyond me. Having sorted the initial issue, I want to read more about others’ experience… and find out why it doesn’t appear to work as described with iTunes. (But that’s another thread.)