Network speeds disappointing

totalfrenzy · January 6, 2012, 11:35am

Hi all,

I bought a WD Live Hub a while ago, mainly for my parents. I don’t really use it often, but whenever I’m asked to put new movies/TV shows on (Usually ~50GB+), it is an absolute pain to copy to.

I have a full gigabit network, and can copy to any of my servers at 480~Mb/s (60~MB/s) on my slowest (7200 rpm) drive, and on a quicker server, a slow speed is 560+Mb/s (70+MB/s).

When the WD Live Hub boasted a 1GbE connection, I thought that was perfect, and as a system administrator, I find it appauling that it only copies at about 110Mb/s (13.6~MB/s). It’s slower than a 5400 rpm drive (30~MB/s).

I can only assume it is the speed of the hard disk that is bottlenecking the system, but I do not have time to investigate. I’ve read USB can be slightly faster, but not given the effort.

I don’t really understand why the thing has 1GbE especially when it can only copy slightly faster than 100MbE… I can only assume streaming off it, which I haven’t tested. But no doubt it’s more important to be able to put items on the device than watch them from another

/rant.

Is it the hard disk, or are there any firmware updates in the works to resolve this problem?

TonyPh12345 · January 6, 2012, 1:27pm

It’s not disk-bound… It’s CPU-bound. The Hub uses the WD Scorpio drive. Plenty fast.

File moving is a CPU-intensive process. Sigma processors aren’t that fast.

But really, you should have searched first… There’s litterally hundreds if not thousands of posts about this…

totalfrenzy · January 6, 2012, 2:12pm

Ah fair enough, even still pretty dissapointing.

Maybe with those thousands posts the next gen hub will hopefully have improved copy speeds.

pearl · January 6, 2012, 6:41pm

just out of curiosity, why is this such and issue with so many people. I get the geek factor that we all buy fast gear so we want to take full advantage of it, but in general why do folks care? When I rip a new movie on one of my computers and then copy to a drive connected to HUB, it is clearly slower than it should be, but still even if it took 20 minutes, I am not usualy in a situation where I need to be viewing it immediatly anyways, its just getting added to the 100s of other movies on the drive to be viewed at a future date.

So not trying to insult anyone, but the speed issue just never really seems to effect me. As long as I can stream movies, which I do from my liveplus to the mylivehub and vice versa, and do the same with music I am in good shape. I agree the network transfer speed is pretty bad but when is it affecting people?

BTW, when I have moved large data transfers like my initial setup, I used a USB drive to do so. And yes, even that is slow if you want to move a TB even when it’s directly connected.

-P

wdtvhub · January 6, 2012, 6:51pm

@pearl I agree with what you say, but only with hindsight now.

I think I have about 20 Gb free on the internal now. But when I got the unit I was naively under the impression that once hard wired that I would be able to drag GBs across at the same sort of speeds as USB. In fact I used to have a Gen 1 and 3 x 1TB drives connected via a powered hub. To get files onto this setup I bought a very long USB cable and put files on the HDs with that.

So when I got the Hub I thought those days were gone, imagine my surprise when the Hub had no Hub support and had the speed of a snail for copying files across.

As I said I know better now, but it did hack me off for a while.

toddsouth · January 6, 2012, 9:01pm

Much like the advert for the product states it easily reads files off of your networked hard drives. I’ve yet to get it to read a network share active. It’s ridiculous that I cannot access a W7 share by IP or that I apparently will have to setup a forwarding DNS in order to have permanent paths within my home network that the WDTV Live Hub can access. Network support could easily incorporate these points if the box is already (supposedly) able to do this. I should not have to shut down firewalls when my Mac and Linux boxes can read the W7 shares just fine.

wdtvhub · January 6, 2012, 9:11pm

I have no problems with shares with W7 really. Had a couple of issues over the years. Always turns out to have been a permissions issue.

pearl · January 6, 2012, 9:16pm

Toddsouth, I am confused on your issue. I have my hub reading Windows7 shares just fine. I find them as network shares, and can view movies no problem. I can also choose a folder and hit “options” and have it added to my media library. The hub seems to find the netbios name of the Windows7 box without issue when browsing my network. I just needed to add the correct name/password combo to attach to the share.

Why access by IP when you can have the hub search for the Win7 box via it’s Netbios Name and available shares?

Sorry if I am not understanding correctly as your post would clearly indicate that you know your network very well.

-P

totalfrenzy · January 7, 2012, 12:33am

Apart from the ‘why not’ factor.

I want the speeds because believe it or not, I use my computer for lots of different things. Often involving restarts. This means that I have to sit there and wait, or god forbid, go outside while I wait for the snail to finish copying.

Also, I’ve never had problems with network shares.

wdtvhub · January 7, 2012, 12:50am

Why not ?

Because its not designed for that really. Its a fancy streaming chipset that sits next to a hard drive.

Even the all great popcorn hours and the rest are the same, I read a while ago now that they remove the hard drives and fit to a docking station to move large files. So its not just this one.

People compare PCs and top of the range networks and a little box with a hard drive. It’s always going to lose.

We probably would not pay for how much it would cost to get that speed, so its a basic point of sales.

pearl · January 7, 2012, 12:56am

I hear ya totalfrenzy, that was my impetus to build another computer to use as a 24/7 server to deal with that type of stuff. No, we shouldn’t have to go through stuff like this, but having another machine that downloads, stores stuff, rips DVD/CSs, shares vid and aud with the hub, does my copying etc made my life a lot easier.

Not the perfect answer but for short money with some used parts etc, it works great. File server / downloader that does not interfere with my normal activities or work stuff. No I am not advising that you build server, but if you can do it and use it to share you files from, you will be alot happier. I luckily have several laptops etc that I use for my day to day stuff.

BTW, are you hard wired or going wireless? I am hardwired on most of my machines and I copy over movies that are 3-4GBs in just a few minutes. Not really that debilitating.

good luck

-p

totalfrenzy · January 7, 2012, 1:48am

You picked one of my two points.

However I do agree that it’s not going to get up there with 80Mb/s, but 13Mb/s is a shame reguardless.

It’s obviously not as convienient, but no doubt I could make a nice little HTPC which suited my needs, which wouldn’t be that much more expensive anyway.

I still think boasting, or even having the 1GbE is unnessicary considering.

totalfrenzy · January 7, 2012, 1:59am

Ah sorry, didn’t see the second page.

Yeah, I can put up a server, at my place anyway. I’ve got an esxi box set up. But you’re right, it’s something that I shouldn’t have to do.

I’m tempted to just build a HTPC next time that does it all in one. Not as small or convenient, but I guess if I have more control over it, I can only complain to myself.

Wired. Yeah one movie isn’t so much a problem, it’s just my folks ask me to take the box overnight to fill it with new movies/tv shows they’ve asked for so it’s often in excess of 50GB. This doesn’t happen regularly enough for me to justify making a HTPC, it just gets under my skin when it does happen.

Especially when I’m waiting for a restart

pearl · January 7, 2012, 2:06am

Totally agree and am in no way trying to diminish your complaints. Lots of marketing fluff no doubt. As I had already owned a livePlus I pretty much knew that adding a LiveHub to my network was just to get a better interface.

I needed a seedbox for torrents anyways as not to bog down my regular day to day machines, so for me the building the extra server suited several purposes at once and was well worth it.

Good luck and hopefuly the features you get outway the issues that arrise :smileyvery-happy:

-P

totalfrenzy wrote:

You picked one of my two points.

However I do agree that it’s not going to get up there with 80Mb/s, but 13Mb/s is a shame reguardless.

It’s obviously not as convienient, but no doubt I could make a nice little HTPC which suited my needs, which wouldn’t be that much more expensive anyway.

I still think boasting, or even having the 1GbE is unnessicary considering.

IamTonyC · January 23, 2012, 7:48am

Try copying two files at one time. See what the sustained speed is.

Alex734 · January 24, 2012, 10:40pm

Transfer is about 14MB with 4 uploads running. Yes, transfers are dissapointing. As an ignorant consumer, I jumped in thinking “oohh” gigabit and hard drive, low power on the network. Transfer speeds had me double checking my switches, wiring, little gigabit lights and the such. Now here I am spending the next 40 minutes transferring these files at 3.5MB X 4. I am not buying the cpu vs transfer issue so I started looking into “tcp checksum offload”. My conclusion is that this device was originally designed for 100mb, 100 vs 1000 cost was the same, and just like I said “oohh gigabit”, WD said the same and slapped it on the box. I dont think the consumer is totally at fault here, after all this is not a fifteen year old computer with a gigabit pci card. I do think they want to sell quality, however this leaves me feeling like I just bought it on DX.

IamTonyC · January 27, 2012, 7:40am

totalfrenzy wrote:

Ah sorry, didn’t see the second page.

Yeah, I can put up a server, at my place anyway. I’ve got an esxi box set up. But you’re right, it’s something that I shouldn’t have to do.

I’m tempted to just build a HTPC next time that does it all in one. Not as small or convenient, but I guess if I have more control over it, I can only complain to myself.

Wired. Yeah one movie isn’t so much a problem, it’s just my folks ask me to take the box overnight to fill it with new movies/tv shows they’ve asked for so it’s often in excess of 50GB. This doesn’t happen regularly enough for me to justify making a HTPC, it just gets under my skin when it does happen.

Especially when I’m waiting for a restart

Agreed. Should be faster, but it isn’t. I dont transfer to the HUB too often, so its kinda ok. But here are some things to consider.

Some people have said that they get better results transferring to a storage device connected via USB, but some of those tests were with USB flash drives and not a comparable hard drive. (probably not an option for you, since in a later post, you indicate that you take the hub from your parents and bring it elsewhere).

Another post indicated that they get better speeds when connected via crossover cable and stated results of “20-40MB/s”. Not sure if that was with a CAT6 cable.

Some state that they experience different results when the hub is setup as “manual” (in network setup) static IP instead of automatic.