Hi, very quick reply, thanks for all the responses, I’ll try the suggested fixes and come back - very optimistic that one of you has seen big improvements, after about 3 weeks I have now managed to get 1.5TB on my mirrored 2TB drive, but it’s darn slow reading - nearly 1TB is music and it takes 30-60 seconds to just list the folders ! - trying a du -hs in terminal never seems to come back !
I’m having ‘soul-numbingly slow’ speeds too. (Aside from the slow internet problem now solved, which I have written a separate thread about).
I’ve just bought a 6TB MBLD, set up with RAID 1. If I use AFP, I get less than 1MB/s. With SMB, as suggested in this thread, I get a whopping… 2.5MB/s. This is after abandoning wireless and connecting by 100Mbs ethernet (via the router).
What can I do? Why are so many people reporting MBLD problems like this, especially with Macs? I’m poised to write a negative review on Amazon…
I’ve just tried disconnecting the router and plugging the MBLD directly into the iMac. I’m now getting 20MB/s - clearly much better, so the router is somehow slowing things up - anyone know why that might be? Is there anything I can do to help it, or is a better router the only answer?
silentdiver, thehat, refer to “Message 14” to optimize your MacBook. It’s not your router issue. It’s the AFP client on Mac that is slow. Regards, Moonshi
thehat wrote:
I’m having ‘soul-numbingly slow’ speeds too. (Aside from the slow internet problem now solved, which I have written a separate thread about).
I’ve just bought a 6TB MBLD, set up with RAID 1. If I use AFP, I get less than 1MB/s. With SMB, as suggested in this thread, I get a whopping… 2.5MB/s. This is after abandoning wireless and connecting by 100Mbs ethernet (via the router).
What can I do? Why are so many people reporting MBLD problems like this, especially with Macs? I’m poised to write a negative review on Amazon…
- *thehat, refer to message 14 within this thread. It should solve your problem.
Thanks mmoonshi - but alas I’ve already done that sysctl.conf thing. I still can’t get better than about 5Mb/s when the MBLD is plugged into the router (best speed so far when the MBLD is connected directly to the iMac with an ethernet cable is 12 Mb/s write, 35Mb/s read).
I’m using a TP-link ethernet bridge which /might/ be the problem, so I’m gradually trying every combination of things. It’s not the router. There’s definitely /something/ at fault, and the MBLD is one of two possibilities, I think. Will post back when I’ve tried more things!
thehat, how is your network connected? Want to share some specifics?
Sure, thanks: I’m using an i3 iMac, running OS 10.6.8. This is connected via a TP-Link ethernet bridge (maximum speed 200mbps) to a TG545 v7 router. The MBLD is plugged into another of its four ports.
Each pair of figures below is write/read in MB/s (as opposed to mbps):
Mac directly to MBLD via ethernet cable: 12/36
Mac to MBLD via bridge and router: 4/5
Mac to MBLD via bridge but not router: 4/5
I’ve also experimented with my wife’s MacBookPro (MBP):
iMac to MBP via router and bridge: 5/6
iMac to MBP via bridge (not router): 5/6
iMac to MBP (direct cable): 39/99
MBP to MBLD (via router but not bridge): 8/10
That’s as far as I’ve got so far. It looks like the bridge causes some loss of speed - but enough to account for everything. This model of router is famously rubbish, so that isn’t helping either. But direct iMac to MBLD is still pretty disappointing.
I guess it might be worth trying an ethernet switch. And a better router. I’m sure things like that might help a bit - but I still have a feeling there’s something about the ethernet connection - or the firmware? - that points the finger at the MBLD as part of the problem. I’m far from a networking expert, though. But if I keep trying these combinations simple logic should identify the suspects! I welcome any thoughts - thanks.
PS I don’t think it’s the cables as I have tried a few different ones.
Back again, probably talking to myself, to report on some improvements. I’ve now established that the ethernet bridge, and probably the router, are significant contributors to the slow speed.
My new setup is to connect the iMac, the MBLD and the ethernet bridge to a TP-Link 5-port gigabit network switch. The other end of the bridge is then connected to the router and thus… the world.
Anyway, the best write/read speeds I’ve managed between the iMac and the MBLD with this setup are so far 20/37 Mb/s.
Other users (**bleep** you, Windows) at this forum seem to have done much better - but I guess it has to be said this is good enough. Looking at the reports at http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/feedback/mac_NAS_and_wireless.html, Synology does well - eg 45/65 Mb/s - but then again that setup with 6TB costs £570 compared to the £320 I paid for the MBLD. You get what you pay for, I suppose.
I still feel the MBLD ought to be able to do better - but maybe the Mac’s AFP and other issues are part of the problem.
Looks like I won’t be sending it back, anyway.
All of this is no thanks to WD’s support people, who haven’t replied to my ticket after nearly a week.
I’ve been following all these threads with similar issues. I bought the 4tb version last weekend.
I’m using a brand new (gen 5) airport extreme, purchased today to try to solve, with a retina macbook pro.
I have boot camp installed with win7, and noticed that my directory browsing is MUCH faster. SMB is an improvement over AFP on the mac side, and I did generate a sysctl.conf with the settings suggested earlier in this thread.
I find it surprising that videos are faster to play on the windows side - and photos take a really long time to load. I can’t figure out why there’s a long delay to open a 2.7mb jpeg. Forget all my RAW photos.
Bridge CS6 does a fast/great job generating thumbnails (well, faster than directory browsing) - but it’s still dog slow.
I can’t figure this out - but it seems like there’s something intrinsic to the browsing behavior of OS X, and possibly something dependent on the media type living on the live duo. I’ve turned off all sharing, and still find that it’s slow.
Thoughts? I’m stumped.
Quick query: When creating the sysctl.conf file (as mentioned in post 14), is it OK to create the file using TextEdit and then drop it into the relevant etc/ folder, or with have some nasty attributes that will make the system barf?
Many thanks!
Well, impatience kicked in and I bit the bullet and created the file in TextEdit. I then dropped the file into Etc/ and rebooted as required. Have to say there is a definite improvement in speed when accessing the MBLD over AFP. To the point that it’s good enough to not bother with SMB. The main problem with SMB was the horrific truncation/mangling of filenames across 1.8Tb of data.
With reference to the speed of the GUI which was also pretty bad, I ploughed through the interface and disabled the iTunes server and DLNA support (since neither were needed) and there appeared to be a considerable improvement in response for the UI too. Very weird and I’m not even going to bother thinking about why that might be, but suffice to say the MBLD lives to see another day now that the UI works and the data read is fast enough across the network.
Thanks for the fix!
My apologies for the late reply. After all that “optimizations”, I decided to test StellarDefrag after which 2 days later, my MacBook Pro HDD could not boot-up.
I am now using my MacBook Air from office and managed to login on this forum. Will get back to you soonest once I settle my MacBook Pro issue over the weekend.
Well I guess I’ll add my experience to hopefully help someone from yanking their hair out.
I to had experienced some mind numbing slow speeds when transferring files to the MBLD. My setup was with the MBLD hooked directly to my MacBook Pro running Mtn Lion. I had no issues at first. My MacBok quickly recognized the drive and I was able to log into the Dashboard and set things up. I immediately went to the ‘Storage’ area and chose the RAID 1 mode. That’s the whole reason I bought the drive. But like everyone else I was getting ridiculous trasnfer speeds. At times it was going to take days to transfer close to 200GB with Time Machine. That’s just not exceptable with a Gigabit connection. But my problems started when I decided to setup the RAID. It took a day and a half for the drive to Rebuild. At first I started to move files because it said the RAID was operational. But maybe that is where I went wrong. After is completed the rebuild I started to do the Time Machine backup. Ever since Aug 18, I’ve been starting and stopping the backup becasue of the crazy times it is giving me to transfer my files. I tried the suggestion in post 14 but that only made things worst for me. Maybe that is a Mtn Lion thing, not sure.
But finally last night I did a factory restore. I once again did the RAID 1 and the rebuild only took 4-5 hours this time. Sweet! Things are looking up. Now my Time Machine backup says 7 hours instead of days. I can live with that even though I think it could be faster. One thing I tested was to do a Time Machine backup with the Maximum Capicity mode before I did the RAID 1. It was only going to take 2 hours for that backup. So I’m not sure if it has anything to do with how a RAID 1 works. One thing to note is that this is with firmware 02.31.08-067, which I guess is the latest as of Aug 21, 2012.
Tony, I am transferring large files from MBLD to my WHS 2011 at 10.2 MB/s. Is that good?
Have a look at this:
http://community.wdc.com/t5/My-Book-Live-Duo/Performance-problems-Read-this-first/td-p/458792
1 Like
Hi, I marked this post as the solution since the other chap’s problem was solved - I needed a solution immediately so cannibalised my unit and put the disks in a new QNAP box ! At some point I’ll get a couple more disks and set the MyBook (how I hate product names prefixed ‘My’…) up again and try the solution you gave. Thanks all.
I have found out what makes these boxes so incredibly slow. Basically they do not have enough memory to support the number of applications that WD tries to run on them. Therefore the box thrashes itself to death hence the slow response time. So if you eliminate (or severley reduce) swapping performance imporves (A LOT!!!)
To fix the problem you need to login as root (described elsewhere) and DISABLE all services you don’t actually need by removing the links from/etc/rc1.d and /etc/rc2.d. Since I use a Mac so I disabled everything except Time Machine, AFP and Bounjour support. I am now seeing (with BlackMagic Disk Speed Test) READ of 80MB/sec and WRITE of 40MB/sec (slightly better than the 3.5MB/Sec I was getting before). I think this is more like what the box should be capable of doing.
I have creatd a couple of scripts that will set your /etc/rcx.d directories back the way they were before and this weekend I am going to work on a couple that will help with disabling services. I will publish them here as soon as they are done. Stay tuned.
Thank you Tony. We look forward to that. Is there any way we could upgrade the RAM?
