I came from a super old firmware (04.00.00-607) and I’d like to share my experiences on the new firmware so far.
First of all, I have applied the same amount of tweaks that I have applied when I was still on the 607 firmware, just to make the testing fair. The tweaks I have applied are simply disabling thumbnail caching and Netatalk, as well as disabling Twonky which I don’t use. I’ve turned off media scanning and DLNA completely. I’ve done all my tests on a Windows 10 running on 512GB SSD and the copies are always a single large file that is 3GB in size.
On the old firmware, I remember I used to get write speeds of up to 60MB/s (note, it’s megaBYTE here) and read speeds of up to 80MB/s. This is when I connect my PC to my router directly via a Cat6 ethernet cable. If I use WiFi AC (while sitting next to the router), I get about 30MB/s even though Windows tells me my speed is 890Mb/s (which is 111.25 MB). The performance was OK.
Now, I’ve updated to the latest 105 firmware and the performance dropped quite heavily. Everything works, SafePoint, MyCloud.com etc, but the performance has been poor. Now I get about 35MB/s write and 60MB/s read while connected via ethernet (same setup, same router etc). On WiFi AC, I get about 19MB/s read and 7MB/s write (again, I’m sitting next to the router and Windows shows my speed as 890Mb/s).
What I know:
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It’s not because WD My Cloud is caching or doing content scans. I’ve disabled that via the tweaks and can see it says IDLE on the dashboard. It goes to sleep perfectly well when it’s not in use and it doesn’t overheat or run hot. It’s not an issue with the CPU etc.
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Ethernet cables are fine, I’ve tested a copy from one PC to another over SMB and it’s around 90MB/s. 1 gigabit connection gives you about 125MB/s so while it could be higher, at least it’s acceptable and I know there are some variances to take into account anyway.
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I’ve tested the transfer (read & write) to my WD My Cloud several times via SMB and FTP. Generally, FTP gives me slightly faster speeds (by about 1~2MB/s) but it’s roughly the same.
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My PC is not the bottleneck here. I know there’s a lot of CPU utilization using Windows Explorer to copy the files, but my CPU averages about 7% utilization during the transfer and I have killed all background/foreground processes during my tests. I’ve got a decent i7 CPU and plenty of RAM (16GB) so nothing is bottlenecking on my PC.
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No other users accessing shares other than me during all testings. In fact, I’m the only one that uses WDMyCloud and I only use it for storage.
Other than that, I’m happy with the rest of the firmware. Safepoints work well and MyCloud.com works for me again (since WD2go got replaced). On the old firmware (607), I didn’t have issues with anything, but I chose to upgrade just so I can get the latest security fixes and features.
I’ll probably stay on this firmware but just thought I’d share my results.
********************** Update **********************
Seeing as someone posted a few Crystal Diskmark screenshots, I thought I’d do the same. I’ve done my tests using Cat6 ethernet 1Gb connection. Surprisingly, my results on my 3TB WD My Cloud seems to have higher read speeds than when I get copying from WD My Cloud (as mentioned above).
While the read speed looks better on Crystal Diskmark, the actual speed I get when copying via SMB (either network location or mapped drive) to/from the WD MyCloud is slow. Even on FTP it’s still the same.
********************** Update 1.5 **********************
Did a few more tests and it seems CrystalDiskMark reports the proper actual real-life results this time, so ignore the one above:
And here’s my usage on WiFi AC (890Mbits/s sitting right next to my router:
The write speeds as you can see in all screenshots, are terrible. Read speed is bad too but not as terrible as write.
What’s interesting is I found these articles here which has similar results to mine, so I’m unsure whether this is NORMAL or not:
Furthermore, this thread here says he got 90MB/s read and 80MB/s write on a gigabit network:
My write speed is half of what he got and that’s just terrible. My Safepoints are not running and everything is idle. WD My Cloud is nice and cool so nothing is using its resources (CPU, memory etc).
My router is an AC router and the LAN ports are definitely gigabit ports. I can see the connection showing as 1Gb on Windows and it’s full duplex.
Obviously like I said, I’ve had much better speeds before on an older firmware. But having read those articles, it seems like the results I got are within the acceptable variance range? I want to think it’s normal, but at the same time I can’t just ignore the fact that I’ve had much better performance on the same device in the past.
********************** Update 2 **********************
Ok, did some more tests just now and I can confirm the bottleneck / issue is definitely on my WD My Cloud. I wanted to make sure the issue wasn’t with my router or my cables, so I took out my old AC router (Netgear D6300) and did all the same tests I’ve done above on there. Tested both gigabit ethernet and WiFi, same results.
I’ve then done the same test but this time connecting directly from my laptop to my WD My Cloud via ethernet. So basically, no routers or switches in between, just a direct connection with a 169.x.x.x address. Same result, the performance speed is the same.
This shows that after the firmware upgrade, my WD My Cloud dropped its write performance by almost half. The read performance shows 109 MB/s in CrystalDisk Mark, which looks good on paper, but the actual performance I got by copying via either SMB or FTP was no where near that.
********************** Update 3 **********************
So, I ended filing through a RMA and have just received my replacement unit yesterday. I’m now very very happy with it!
First off, I have made no changes to all the testing methods and equipment. Still the same gigabit router, same ethernet cat6 cable that I’ve used, etc. Software wise, all the same version and build, including Windows (I’ve tested on WIndows 10 build 10586 btw).
Here are the results, both CrystalDisk Mark, native SMB copy and also using TeraCopy v2.3:
This is tested multiple times and the speed stays consistent.
Now, what’s really generous of WD is that they actually sent me the WD MyCloud 3TB Gen2. It’s using firmware v2 rather than v4 for Gen1s, and I can see this on the dashboard as well:
Also, I’m updated to the latest Gen2 firmware as of this writing:
One thing I must stress is all testing were done with the factory, out of the box settings. I have not disabled Twonky, have not enabled FTP or even tested FTP (I probably should and will at some point), and most importantly I have not applied any tweaks. The device goes to sleep well and doesn’t have any issues so far, so I think compared to my crappy Gen1, I don’t really have to apply many tweaks to make it run smoothly.
More importantly, the actual performance stats I’ve got here is quite impressive. I’m really happy with the results. Many thanks to WD for providing me a Gen2 as they didn’t have to do that.
