My Book Live 2TB Very slow

plug the drive directly into your computer’s lan port and then transfer.  Check your speed.  If it’s the same, you can rule out the router as the issue.

@cman548: I have tried a few options. I tried the direct connection to my computers LAN; and I received speeds around about 50mb/s. I thought it was my £180 linksys E4200 router that was causing the problem.

Then I checked directly connecting to the Killer card in game mode an I got 300kb/s. In throughput mode 5mb/s. I changed the settings to run at 1000 speed and the speed was unusually slow.

Lastly I connected the router to my computer LAN and checked speed and I am getting between 20 - 30mb/s and I can live with that.

I would like to thank all the contributers on this forum for helping me resolve this problem. 

Thanks

Probably your CABLES or your PC’s NIC.

You ought to get well over 200 MBit/sec to the MBL!

Logon as root using SSH onto your MBL and issue the command ifconfig.

On interface eth0 what are the error, dropped, overruns and framevalues forRX packetsandTX packets`?

Also, what are the value for collisions?

WDTony wrote:

Have you recently added photos to the Shared pictures folder? If so, that might be the reason it seems like it is accessing the drive even though you are not doing anything. There is a background process that transcodes photos to formats acceptable to Mobile devices for the WD Photos application. This is a low priority process, so can take quite a while.

 

Other processes that might be happening in the background is the DLNA software indexing the media as you are adding it.

 

is there a way to turn off the background processing managing pictures  if you have no plans to use this on a mobile device?

I have comparable issues  with my new WD Live (3 TB).

Facts: 

  • I’m running a Mac OS (Leopard).

  • iMac and WD Live are connected via Gigabit-Rout

  • My network is running over cat 6. 

  • I’m running my backup using Time Machine 

  • it works sporadically i.e. 8GB in 5-10min and then 20kb in the following 2hours .

My problem ist strange because the router will be gettinh slower over the time

Starting backup with total data to backup of ca. 500 GB:

  1. hour:   60 GB / hour 

  2. hour 15 GB / hour

  3. hour 1 GB / hour

  4. hour <1GB / hour

What can be the reason for this behaviour?

I, too, am experiencing poor performance.

  1. I can’t view media from TM server to PS3 (wireless G) or just from the drive to my vista laptop (wireless N) without choppy video and delayed reaction to audio playback.

  2. The use of the on-board configuration software takes 10-30s to load a page in my browser (no wireless involved).

  3. No new media on the drive in weeks (no reason a background process should be running).

I have used wired and wireless, I have tried multiple routers. Nothing improves performance reasonably. I guess I could wire directly from one computer to the drive but that’s not really what this device is supposed to do.

I already had a drive USB’d into one of my computers that worked fine. I had made this purchase with the expectation that I could centralize my media for consumption. Is this not really the case?

If this forum is not the right spot to find a solution please let me know and I’ll head in another direction.

Thanks for any and all help in speeding up my drive access.

I’m having a very similar issue to the above.  I purchased this drive on the day I upgraded to OS X lion.  I have a USB backup drive that I use with CCC to have a bootable backup but thought I would try time machine.  When I first purchased the drive it wouldn’t work properly due to a firmware issue.  I waited until I received an email alert, upgraded the firmware and it still works very slow, about 1GB per hour if I’m lucky.  At the moment, it’s been backing up and has moved 7GB in as many hours.  I tried taking the router out of the equation and plugged the lan directly into my macbook pro’s ethernet port and it makes no difference.  Additionally, my drive takes forever to load up its dashboard occasionally taking so long that it times out, even if directly connected to my MBP via the ethernet port, even showing the following error multiple times, “the network link is down or has become intermittent please check your network connection”  I was directly connected to the drive!

I have had good luck in the past with WD drives and I gave WD the benefit of the doubt when I got this drive 2 weeks ago but I need to know if this is something that they can fix or if I’m going to have to take this back.  I didn’t buy a NAS to have it perform like a tape backup.  

Eclectophile wrote:

I’m having a very similar issue to the above.  I purchased this drive on the day I upgraded to OS X lion.  I have a USB backup drive that I use with CCC to have a bootable backup but thought I would try time machine.  When I first purchased the drive it wouldn’t work properly due to a firmware issue.  I waited until I received an email alert, upgraded the firmware and it still works very slow, about 1GB per hour if I’m lucky.  At the moment, it’s been backing up and has moved 7GB in as many hours.  I tried taking the router out of the equation and plugged the lan directly into my macbook pro’s ethernet port and it makes no difference.  Additionally, my drive takes forever to load up its dashboard occasionally taking so long that it times out, even if directly connected to my MBP via the ethernet port, even showing the following error multiple times, “the network link is down or has become intermittent please check your network connection”  I was directly connected to the drive!

 

I have had good luck in the past with WD drives and I gave WD the benefit of the doubt when I got this drive 2 weeks ago but I need to know if this is something that they can fix or if I’m going to have to take this back.  I didn’t buy a NAS to have it perform like a tape backup.  

Nas drives are not meant to work directly connected to your computer.  That’s probably why it’s working intermittently.  If you’ve updated the firmware, I would consider going into the UI and in Settings click on Reboot.  Sometimes that’s necessary.  I’m using mine after the update and it’s fine. 

Also, you need to know that your network speeds are determined by your router and nic cards - whatever speeds they run at.  Just know that they won’t be as fast as a USB drive.  That’s the nature of the beast.  However, the drive should be transferring faster than 1 GB an hour.  There might be something else causing it to be so slow for you, though.  Mine takes about 5 minutes to transfer 1 GB.  And it can be slower or faster depending on if I’m doing other things on the network. 

I get good connection speed when connect by a network cable, and can not even bring up the MBL UI screen over wifi.

The screen stops loading at 9 out of 10 items.

I have the MBL connected to a Netgear DGN2000 router and am using OS X Lion 10.7.2.

I also have the lastest WD MBL firmware loaded.

I completed a backup using Timemachine when the drive was directly connected to the MAC and can connect to MBL drive through “Finder”.

Can not work out why the UI wont come up.

I’m experiencing the same problem of bad performance. 3TB drive is slow via USB 2.0 as well as Firewire 400. Tried to compete against my Buffalo external device via USB 2.0 and eSATA. Scenario: 5 files, 2.5 GB all together. Make a copy from and to the same drive. Result: Buffalo is about 55-60s (USB/eSATA), MyBook about 2:55m (USB/FW). This is inacceptable, as this is far too slow for watching HD videos (e.g., downloaded from Vimeo). SplitCrow’s point is right: if support is unable to help it, I will as well head into an other direction, which is returning the drive to Amazon.

Found it! http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/248665-14-external-slow-transfers-firewire#t1765169 → Use Legacy driver on controller

Sorry for writing the third post in a row. Still have no acceptable solution.
Scenario: copy 5 files which are 2.5 GB together from and to same drive.

  • FW400 with standard controller driver → 20MB/s (MegaBYTES)
  • FW400 with Legacy controller driver → same
  • FW400 with ubCore controller driver → same
  • USB 2.0 → same
    Each having write caching enabled.

Any ideas?

Windows 7 64 bit. New 3TB WD external hard drive with NTFS.

Just bought it today and updated, finding it very slow I have a netgear N Router, will give a couple of days

globetrotter, this is the network forum, for the My Book Live, so you probably won’t get the answers you want here.

I’m having the same problem with my 3TB drive right now and am starting to think my unit might be defective.  I get crazy variations in the speed from 40MB/s for maybe half a second down to 50 bytes/s.  It’s to the point where sometimes I can’t even open the folders…  Trying to move as much data as I can from the drive onto another and then I’m gonna try a full reset.  If this doesn’t work… I’m going to have to exchange it :frowning:

So I ended up restoring the drive and it was fast again.  However, when I tried to move over full directories with lots of sub folders it would slow down significantly on my mac and even stopping any file operations would take ages.  However, when I tried the same file operations on my PC, it was running fairly smoothly.

I’m currently trying to back up my mac using time machine and it’s transfering at an average of 120kb/s - 10.3MB/s.  Is anybody else experiencing similar problems on their mac?

My solution is simple: send back the disk and get one more eSATA or Ethernet HD which are unbelievably fast. I assume Microsoft just tries to stop FW devices by strategy …

Hi,

I bought a My Book Live 2TB today and it’s ridiculously slow as well - it takes about an hour to backup 1 GB. I thought it was my router at first, but connecting the device to my laptop (with Gb ethernet) doesn’t make a difference. I have updated my firmware and restarted the device, really disappointing. I guess it’s defective, so will return it.

Regards,

Johan

using smartware, or just copying to a share?