MyBook Live 2TB Lacking Speed (Wired and Wireless)

WD Legacy Products My Book Live
1

Hello all,

I have searched the forums, and tried many of the solutions but none seem to be common.

Transferring via wireless to my hard drive gives me no more than 6-8MB/s, while wired doesn’t push beyond 12MB.

I am running a Cisco Linksys E4200 dual band Gbit router ( http://homestore.cisco.com/en-us/Routers/Linksys-E4200-MaximumPerformance-Wirelessn-router_stcVVproductId122703236VVcatId551966VVviewprod.htm)

My laptop has Wireless N capability, and gigabit ethernet.

I have Norton 360 running, and when I disable it, it pushes the speed up by 1-2MB but nothing too much. I expected much higher speeds to be completely honest. I’m kind of disappointed.

Regards

2

Well, WiFi can be unpredictable in performance.   8 megabytes per second, really, is nothing to sneeze at; that’s decent performance.    Don’t EVER expect the 150 to 300 megabits per second the marketers put on 802.11n packaging…  That’s only in VERY CLEAN networks.

But your wired performance should be closer to 20 to 30 megabytes per second.

Unfortunately the Linksys product line STINKS in its ability to provide statistics on connections;  that’s why I went and bought “Smart Switches” instead of using the 4 ports on the back of my E3000’s.   Looking at statistics, I was able to find that several of my devices were running port errors due to faulty connectors on the cables.  

But you can look in the MBL’s interface statistics and see if there’s any indication there, and likewise with your laptop.

On the MBL, enable SSH (lots of posts here on how to do that.)   SSH into the box and issue the command “ifconfig eth0” as shown here:

MYBOOKLIVE:~# ifconfig eth0
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:90:a9:f6:05:f8
          inet addr:10.0.0.15 Bcast:10.0.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::290:a9ff:fef6:5f8/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
          RX packets:2180991 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:485368 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:602774236 (574.8 MiB) TX bytes:142346724 (135.7 MiB)
          Interrupt:32

 Note the ERRORS on mine are all 0.    Yours should be zeros, too.

On your Win7 laptop, issue the command “netstat -e” as shown here:

C:\Users\Tony>netstat -e
Interface Statistics

                           Received Sent

Bytes 3417699871 476717925
Unicast packets 51199305 52258769
Non-unicast packets 4461522 2059917
Discards 0 0
Errors 0 0
Unknown protocols 0

 again, errors should be ZERO.

Unfortunately, without the ability to look in the switch, those only tell half the story; those commands only reflect errors RECEIVED by the device, not errors RECEIVED by the SWITCH.

3

Thanks for that information. All errors were Zero (0) in both the NAS and Local Machine.

I rebooted all devices and turned OFF antivirus auto-scan, and it seems to be hovering around the 22-24 MB mark which seems to be somewhat reasonable. It did however peak (for 5 seconds) @ 50MB/s which is more like what I’ve been expecting.

Admittedly, I did expect a better performance via ethernet at at least. Nonetheless, it will have to do, unless you can provide a different alternative?

4

Antivirus auto-scan seems to be the bottleneck.

50 MB/s is probably a bit of a red herring; related to the way Windows does its math on throughput calculations.

22-24 is really quite reasonable for a Windows box.

When I did my benchmarks, I got sustained 31 megabytes per second “RAW” throughput on a high-performance Linux machine not running any kind of virus software – just raw data transfer through Samba.