I have a 6TB MyBook Live DUO on my home network. I am not mirroring and currently have approximately half of my drive filled (3TB). I have a Cat5e network cable hardwired between my iMac and my Apple Airport Extreme Router. My MBL Duo is connected directly to my router. I generally transfer 3 to 25 GB of movie files from my iMac to my MBL DUO at a time. I feel the transfer speeds are not as fast as they should be. It generally takes approximately 8 or 9 minutes to transfer a 5GB file. Is this normal? It also seems to take close to a minute before it decides to start transferring (like it’s evaluating whether I have enough room on the drive, or that it wants to even perform the task for me). How fast should a 5GB file move from my computer to my network drive? Are their any settings I should be aware of either on my iMac or on the MBL Duo that I should change to make the transfer faster? It takes approximately 25 minutes to transfer 14GB of data (3 files). One last thing, I am in the market for a larger external drive. I am considering the new 24TB WD DL4100 when it comes over in a couple weeks. Will the transfer speed be any different with this drive? I appreciate any info. Thank you. Chris
Hi There and welcome to the WD community.
Are you connecting the iMac wired or wireless? This could make a difference with the transfer speed.
Thank you for the reply. I am hard wired between my imac and the airport extreme router. I also have my MBL Duo connected directly into the Airport Extreme router as opposed to a switch. My distance in cat5e wire between my imac and router is probably all of 25 feet. My MBL Duo is sitting directly next to my Airport Extreme (same cabinet). As I type, I am moving 7 files totaling 34.64GB between my imac and the 6TB drive. After about 5 minutes of adjusting, the transfer bar is saying it is going to take about 1 hour to complete the transfer. It just seems a bit too slow. In addition, it doesn’t always complete. Sometimes it ends in an error. If I remember correctly, an error-36?
Another thing to note: When transfering files between two MyBookLive drives on the network, it takes twice as long and I cant seem to do much of anything on Safari (very very slow in loading pages, etc.)
Thank you for your help.
Chris
Hello, From what i see thats a pretty decent transfer speed, i tried to copy 40+ gigabytes over the network one time and got 12 mins what i founed strange is the error 36 while transfering.
I appreciate you staying with me on this. I edited my previous post just before your replied. I mentioned that when transfering files between two MyBookLive drives on the network, it takes twice as long and I cant seem to do much of anything on Safari (very very slow in loading pages, etc.). You mentioned transferring 40 GB over the network (i presume you mean local network) in 12 minutes. It took about 55 minutes for me to transfer 34 GB last night. Any ideas as to how this can be sped up? Thanks.
Right now, I am transferring a 6GB file and the transfer bar says it is going to take 28 minutes.
Chris
Right now I am transferring 2 files totaling 10.68GB between two MyBookLive drives and the transfer bar is saying its going to take 53 minutes to perform this task. Really?
It seems to be really slow, have you tried connect the unit directly to the computer to see if it makes any difference?
I will give that a shot and let you know. Thanks.
Hey, I wanted to loop back and make it known that I found my problem. If anyone else is having the same problem, I found that I had a CAT 3 cable between my switch and the wall jack that led to my router. Everything that was plugged into that switch was running at snail speed. I don’t know how a CAT 3 network cable ended up in my batch of wiring. So, I am making the suggestion to all of you out there with a transfer speed problem, to double and triple check you wiring. You need CAT 5 at minimum to see decent transfer speed happen. I went from 45 minutes to transfer 4 HD movie files of 5GB each (20GB total) to 3 minutes. Yea Hi! Thats a big difference. Hope this was helpful.
I use CAT1 because I love nostalgia. 
