Mac Photo Library to EX2 - Transfer Time = 8 Days!

[MacHooligan]

Hello all, first time poster here. Hoping some of you wise heads can help out. 

I’ve purchased a WD My Cloud EX2 specifically so I can remove the Photos library from my MacBook Pro (

2.2 GHz Intel Core i7 2014 15" Retina running OSX Yosemite 10.10.2) to an external drive. 

Very happy witht the fast easy set up of the EX2 after unboxing this afternoon. 

Problems arose when I tried to drag & copy my photos library to the EX2. Size of the library is 57GB. 

All looked OK as I was getting an initial transfer time of 4 hours. Upon checking back 30 minutes later transfer time was estimated at 8 days!! At which point I hit the stop button. 

Can anyone suggest what I’m doing wrong here or how to proceed? Really need these files off my Mac HD. 

Router is a Technicolour TG799vn V2 running unlimited Fibre package via Zen internet. Everthing is cabled up correctly using the supplied ethernet cables. Home network running smooth & fast with no issues. 

[Cybernut1]

I am not a Mac user so I have very little helpful advice. My main point/question is to ask whether you are using a wired gigabit ethernet connection from your computer to the router (to which the EX2 is attached) and not wi-fi. If not, well, then that’s your primary issue.

The other thing I would advise is that you break your file copying into smaller chunks, esp. if the number of files are too many. 57GB of photos can be A LOT of photos. You do not want to overwhelm the weak processor of the EX2, by throwing that many files to copy at one time.

Good luck.

[MacHooligan]

Hi, I tried wifi first then tried again via a USB cable connected directly from Mac to EX2. Go tthe same huge transfer times showing up. 

Am I doing something wrong here? The idea of the EX2 is great for me. But at this point it seems like an expensive paperweight

[tex73]

i don’t have the EX2 yet, but i’d think you’d just want to connect the mac to the network via ethernet… rather than connecting the mac directly to the EX2 via USB.

[george_h]

I’m not sure plugging your Mac USB port into the USB ports on the EX would work as both want to be USB hosts.

You don’t say what type (speed) your WiFi connection is between your Mac and the router. If you Mac has a gigabit ethernet port on it then you’ll get by far the best throughput by connecting your Mac to the router with a Cat5e/Cat6 cable rather than WiFi and ensuring your EX2 is plugged into the router with a Cat5e/Cat6 cable. There are lots of ethernet cables out there which only have four of the cores connected at each end instead of all eight. They are fine for 100Mb ethernet but do not work at 1Gb. You can easily check by looking at the plug at each end and seeing if each contact has a wire going to it.

One thing to remember about WiFi is that there are a limited number of channels and you share those with your neighbours, even if you don’t realise it! WiFi is never as good as hard wired ethernet, it is just an easy way of not having wires.