Question about attached USB drives

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud EX2
1

Hi,

Apologies if this is a basic question but I’m new to the WD EX2.

I have a large amount of data on an external USB drive that I want to copy to the the EX2 - if I do this over the network it will take quite a while - can I attach the external drive to the EX2 and copy to the EX2s drives?

Thanks

Steve

2

Hi steverose798 and welcome.

Yes, you could  (and perform copy via EX2 Backup menu), but for some unexplained (from WD) USB issues please don’t expect a real USB3 (or 2) transfert rate.

Here on forum, you will find a a lot of people quite angry for this … and plenty of other bugs, including USB backup/restore.

Good luck and be patient :wink:

3

Thanks - I’ll give it a try.

4

You may find it helpful to search on the sub-forum first before posting - a lot of common questions have already been asked and some may have been answered.

This over a year old post might be helpful  →   http://community.wd.com/t5/My-Cloud-EX2/Very-slow-transfer-speeds-even-when-external-drive-is-connected/m-p/770671#M868

5

USB issues here too (amongst many others!)

An external USB hard drive refuses to work and hangs the GUI which fails to recover however long it’s left.  There is no response to the Reset button, the only way to recover and gain access is to power cycle the device.

Flash Drives - 32GB Flash drives (Kingston G4) appear to work but a 64GB drive corrupts after a few writes when backing up more than 25GB(ish) of data from the EX2.  The Flash drive can be recovered on a PC (and works perfectly) but when attached again to the EX2 the scenario repeats.

Other issues include GUI hangs.

Cloud access user count wrong.

Files copied to EX2 have their Attributes stripped.

Email notifications when it feels like it…

The beauty of this product is barely skin deep.  Over 2 months since my issues were reported to WD, logs and detailed descriptions supplied but no response, no resolution.

I’ve only just become aware of the level of problems experienced by others.

6

I copied about 42 GB of movies from my WD My Passport Ultra attached to the NAS via USB and the transfer took 30 minutes which is equivalent to 23.5 MB/s. I used Backups → USB Backups and created a job. I set the Back Up Type = COPY and Auto Start = OFF.

Copying the same data using my WD My Passport Ultra connected to my Macbook takes 13 minutes which is equivalent to 55 MB/s. I’m using wired ethernet. The estimated transfer time using wireless was 2 hours so I avoided it.

Using the WD My Passport Ultra attached to the NAS via USB the performance seems OK to me. It’s not the absolute fastest method but it’s convenient e.g. I could take the Macbook elsewhere, turn it off, sleep it etc. If I was going to transfer more data e.g. 1-2 TB then I would definitely use this method for convenience.

It’s easy to see how the Backup program works. Using SSH to connect to the NAS, you can see that there are two rsync processes working hard together. One to get the data from the USB drive and one to write it to the NAS? It might also explain why using the Macbook can speed up the transfer when using wired ethernet because the reading is being done in parallel by the Macbook.