Thought I’d offer my experience here, I bought my MBL around a year ago.
Out of the box, I plugged it into my 10/100 router using two cat 5 cables, one between MBL and router, the other between router and desktop PC. Desktop PC had gigabit LAN capability - but obviously with a 10/100 router the router was a bottleneck. I achieved transfer rates between MBL and PC of 4 megabytes / second - slow, I thought, for a 10/100 link.
Disappointed, i researched and found complaints online about slow MBL transfer rates. So I decided to test the MBL by plugging it directly into my laptop with a cat 5 cable. Again, 4 megabytes / second, slow. Not sure what speed the laptop LAN port was, probably 10/100, but because this was well below what I should have achieved I therefore formed a view that the MBL was either a faulty or simply slow device and would soon be replaced.
Over the last year, my network has grown considerably - now using a gigabit router, quite a complex belkin av500 powerline connection with 5 points, but the MBL was was still connected to the network via the same old 10/100 router (for geographic reasons). Never got more than 4 megabytes / second.
Interestingly, around a week ago, I begun to ready myself for upgrade to a Qnap or similar NAS to replace the MBL at last. Nearly bought one, but, Before doing so, I thought I may as well upgrade the final piece in the puzzle, the 10/100 router. Replaced it with a netgear gigabit switch, and while I was at it, ran a cat 6 cable direct to my PC to bypass any potential bottleneck my powerline 500mbps network might create.
Fwoar - hasn’t that changed things. The light on the back of the MBL suddenly flicked from orange to green, and I’m now getting transfer rates of 39-42 megabytes / second on a sustained transfer of 2 TB. Accessing it simultaneously from two other devices while that transfer is running is giving me sustained rates of 5-10 megabytes / second on those second and third transfers.
My opinion of the MBL has changed and the Qnap idea has now been shelved.
Admittedly I also did a firmware update on the MBL when I upgraded to the gigabit switch, whether WD changed any performance settings with that upgrade I don’t know. But I have subsequently formed the view that the MBL is not a slow device - it’s clearly just highly sensitive to the network it’s connected to.
Personally, I would never even attempt to use a wireless connection to transfer 2tb of data onto an MBL. Streaming wirelessly from it once everything is copied across, sure. But for anyone having problems with wireless or 10/100mb connections, I strongly recommend that cat 6 cables and gigabit routers are the first things I’d be trying.
Hope my experience helps someone -
M