Problems with WebDAV

It would appear (though I have no proof) that WD is now using WebDAV instead of CIFS/SMB when making connections between a Win7 box (and maybe other systems) and PRIVATE shares on the MBL.

This is leading to some rather annoying behavior;  there’s lots of indirect mentions of this in other threads, but I’ll summarize what I’ve seen as consequences.

1-   It’s INCREDIBLY slow.  

   a) Copying a large (10GB+) file, I only get 6 megabytes per second write.   Copying that same file to the PUBLIC share (which uses SMB) I get 50+ Megabytes per second.

   b)  DELETING a single folder that has 10,000 files in it takes about 10 minutes to “Discover,” and then individually delete each file.   Doing this on the PUBLIC folder takes about 10 seconds; the whole folder is deleted at once.

2-  Poor utilization of drive space…  The WD creates MANY (2x) DAV files / folders, and those files and folders are consuming 10% of the space on my drive.   I copied my 44GB iTunes library over;  the WD created 10,000+ DAV files that take about 5 Gbytes of space…  it’s wasted space.

3-  Intermittent Errors:

   When DELETING that iTunes folder, I got about 30 errors:  “The file name you specified is not valid or too long. Specify a different file name.”   What?   *I* am not specifying a file name;  Windows is.

   When COPYING files to the MBL, I get errors:  “The file is too large for the file system.”

  “The file is too large for the file system.”

 

 

I’ve seent his happening as well. Something that came to my attention is that when you recieve this error message the drive is mapped as “FAT”

Another issue I’ve seen with the private share (tho i am not sure if it is related to the same), is that when you access one using WD2GO web access you get “Delay Write Fail…”. Do not know if this helps

Yep…   Here’s other “oddities…”

On a PRIVATE Share:

On the PUBLIC share:

As you pointed out, it’s mounted as “FAT” as opposed to “NTFS.”   Now in reality, both are wrong…  But Microsoft treats SMB connections as NTFS, regardless of what the remote file system is  (in the case of the MBL, the remote FS is EXT4.)

The Free / Used data is wrong.   I put 48 gigabytes of data on there, and Microsoft says there’s 169 GB used. The PUBLIC share properties are CORRECT.

MyBookLive:~# df -BG
Filesystem 1G-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
....
/dev/sda4 924G 48G 876G 6% /DataVolume

 … and the SECURITY and QUOTA tabs are missing from the PROPERTIES menu.

I’m not liking this very much…

I copied my iTunes folder to the PUBLIC directory… it took 15 minutes.

I copied my iTunes folder to the PRIVATE share … it took 2 hours.

I am not using WD2Go.  Remote Access is DISABLED on my MBL…  So it appears one must use WebDAV even if one doesn’t have remote sharing enabled…