MBL is wire on router, all other devices (WD TV Live, Laptop, phone, tablet) are via wireless N.
The problem is, after wireless connectivity is establieshed, copy file from laptop (win7) to MBL could have ~9MB/s, one day later, speed dropped to 5MB/s, 2 days later 2 MB/s… after one week, I can only have 400KB/s…
Then in Win7, disconnect wireless, reconnect it again, speed is back, then drop day after day again…
But I don’t have any problem accessing Internet from Laptop via wireless, full download speed at any time. I don’t have problem too with watching 720p movie by using WD TV Live/MBL/Wireless, only copying files from Laptop to MBL is getting slower and slower day after day…
Front Panel LED stopped working after about one month. Many other users have reported this same problem. I’m going to get an RMA when I have the time and return this brick for a new one because of the LED problem alone.
The drive runs all the time and never shuts down, even though energy save is enabled and there is nothing accessing the drive. It feels like it is beating itself to death internally 24/7.
File transfer speed to/from the MBL is always much slower than I can achieve with any hard drive on any PC in the home network. Everything on the home network is Gigabit except for one 16-Port 100 Mbps POE switch which only services the Kestrel nestbox camera. The camera FTPs its videos and snapshots to the MyBookLive when a Kestrel enters the nestbox. Some older PCs are 100 Mbps, some are Gigabit, but the lan speed does not appear to be the problem; it’s the drive itself.
If I start to do internal (to the MBL) directory maintenance (moving files, creating directories, copying files to my laptop, etc.) it starts off reasonably fast but then slows down to an absolute crawl. (Example: 7 hours to move ~2000 60kb pictures.) A drive reboot will temporarily speed things up again, but sometimes I can’t even get to the dashboard and have to power the drive off to force a restart.
Dashboard access is slow or non-functional, and all DOWN-grading from IE7 to IE8 (recommended by WD) did was subject me to the degradation of browsing capabilities that IE8 brings. Sometimes all I see is the “Please Wait” spinning icon going for many, many minutes before I finally get pissed and unplug the drive to restart it. This is Toro-dung!
22Jan2012 09:33 Disabled the iTunes Service. Seemed to speed things up temporarily; one less piece of toro dung running.
22Jan2012 09:46 WD Smartware installed is version 1.5.1.6.
22Jan2012 uninstalled WD Smartware since it was hogging CPU resources in the PC (WDFME.EXE process); the PC became unusable. See http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-Smartware/WDFME-exe-RAM-hog/td-p/250634/page/11 for more info. WD support said that it is not needed to perform most activities with the MyBookLive, so out it came. Conclusion: WD Smartware is nothing but dumb bloatware that you can easily live without.
25Jan2012 10:23 - Had to power off drive to get to dashboard (AGAIN).
16Feb2012 - I’m getting at the end of my rope with the problems this drive has and the fact that I have to reboot it multiple times per day in order to use the data that is stored on the drive. I could have gone to Home Depot and paid $2.00 for a brick instead of $225.00.
22Feb2012 - Disabled Twonky Service, which appeared to reduce the drive flogging itself, which is probably due to the Twonky indexing. That helped to speed up the transfer rate, but the final assist to speed up the transfer rate came when the anti-virus (Kaspersky Internet Security 2012) was temporarily disabled for a drive backup [I’m behind a firewall anyway]. I closed all known links to the outside world (IE, Mail, etc.) and stopped all unnecessary system tasks using Task Manager also. I’m currently transferring about 80-90 GB of files from the MBL to an old Dell 8250 with a Western Digital Caviar SE WD3200JB 320GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100 Drive and by periodically recording snapshots of the I/O Write Bytes column of Task Manager, I’m seeing long-term average transfer rates of ~4.6GB per hour (1.28 MB/sec). This appears to be what WD and other users have seen, which is not what the advertised transfer rates of the drive are. I have seen this PC’s drive do transfer rates of about 7 MB/Sec from one PC to another, but at this point, I’m happy to see that at least the MBL transfer rate doesn’t drop with usage like it did with Twonky enabled. Too bad, I wanted to be able to use Twonky to stream the Kestrel Videos and Pics to the living room flatscreen for viewing. Another broken promise. Looks like I’ll have to use a USB drive instead; so much for technological “advances.” I’ll be curious to see what XFER rate I get when I do the same manual backup to a Dell 4700 with a Gigabit LAN card and 3Gb/Sec 750MB Caviar Black SATA drives.
Note: I used the old Dell 8250 with XP/IE7 to access the MBL dashboard and had no problems. I’m going to do some more testing after the backup completes and my gut feeling is that I’m going to rip out IE8 from my working laptop and go back to IE7 because I think IE8 draws a 30" vacuum.
Another Kestrel nesting season is starting up within a month and my research depends on fast, reliable access to the data logged into the NAS drive. My time is valuable and I don’t believe that I’m going to depend on WD as a “for the long haul” NAS drive unless I get resolution of ALL the problems. I’ve been looking at Synology as a supplier of my next NAS drive. More expensive, but cost is not an issue here. I need performance, not broken promises.
What really pisses me off is the lack of description about what is actually going on in the drive with regard to indexing, Twonky, firmware, etc. I see some users are talking about Unix commands to do things with the drive LEDs etc, but where is that documented? There should be some documentation to reflect the conclusions that both myself and other users have come to regarding Twonky indexing, whether the WD “Smartware” is required, etc., etc.
I have used WD hard drives (Caviar, Caviar Black & Scorpio Black) exclusively for over a decade now and recommend and install them for clients, and will continue to do that as long as the hard drives themselves continue to maintain their excellent reliability record. I have had clients start to ask about NAS drives recently, and honestly, I’ve told them not to waste their money on Western Digital NAS drives due to all of the issues reported by hundreds of users on the forum, not just myself.
It would be interesting to see if changes would occur if some of the “pointy-haired” bosses in Western Digital started to see what issues are being reported in the forums about the NAS products. Or . . . if anything at all gets done.
I am running Vista 32 bit … I have updated my Network card drivers over the few years … I just uninstalled the updates after downloading the original ones from Dell… and reinstalled them … I now can transfer at Mega speeds…. through my D-Link 655 router … I wish I had done this ages ago …
