Slow Usb 3.0 Transfer Speeds (one twentieth expected speed)

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

Simply put, when I am transferring files from the My Cloud, to a USB 3.0 drive, I am at most ever getting a transfer rate of 30.1 MB/s (240 mbps). Granted, a normal Usb 2.0 should be able to do twice that, and a 3.0 should be able to do around twenty times the speed I am seeing. 5gbps (640MBps).

Literally, all I have done is drag some files from the MyCloud to the attached drive. I am using Windows 10.

2

Slow copying speeds from a drive attached to the My Cloud’s USB port is a well known and well discussed issue in this support form. You can use the forum search feature (the magnifying glass icon upper right) to find those other threads.

A few suggested solutions:
Use either the My Cloud Desktop program, the My Cloud Mobile Apps (for iOS or Android) to move/copy files from the USB drive attached to the My Cloud to the Shares on the My Cloud (or vise versa). Or issue a copy/move command using the SSH interface.

Connect the USB drive direct to the computer, connect the computer via Ethernet wire to the same router/gateway/switch/hub that the My Clouds is connected too in order to transfer a large amount of files to the My Cloud.

One possible reason for the slow transfer rate when using Windows File Explorer or Mac Finder, which is made even WORSE if one is connected via Wi-Fi, is the data being copied or moved is flowing from the USB drive, through the My Cloud, then through the user’s computer, then back to the My Cloud to the Share on the My Cloud.

If you haven’t reviewed the following thread its a good starting point for trying to deal with slow copying speeds.

https://community.wd.com/t/before-you-pack-up-your-wd-and-return-it-lets-talk-about-copying-speeds/91887

4

Thank you for the fast reply, there’s a ton of information to absorb there and throughout the forum.
Let me try doing an SSH transfer, and I’ll post my findings.

5

I managed to find one post that basically outlines th eproblem

“The USB port on the MyCloud might have USB3 compliant hardware, but the processor cannot transfer data at anywhere near USB3 speeds” - that’s my problem, right there. I wasn’t using WIFI, and I had gigabit throughout.

I must say, very disappointing, tbh - but yes it is mentioned here in the manual on page 95. Based on the specs, I did have the expectation of real-world USB 3.0 performance when using the port on the device itself. I actually believed the drive might even perform better directly on the My Cloud, than elsewhere, because there might be a chance the device was smart enough to understand when a drive transfer was occuring from on the MyCloud to the attached USB 3.0 port. That’s not the case, it seems. I’m getting the impression the file manager tha tinitiates the transfer, the files need to round robin over the network.

So the expection of File on My Cloud → to Drive on My Cloud 3.0 port.

is more like

File on My Cloud → Network → File System of OS/ Computer → Network → My Cloud → to Drive on My Cloud 3.0 port.

Unless you believe I have misunderstood something, or something else needs to be mentioned, I’ll mark this as “the solution”. Hopefully the next person searching the forums can use this post to find this fact out much more rapidly, than digging through the much longer thread (as I did).

6

That is very slow, it will waste a lot of your time. A multi threaded file transferring software could help you in this case. In my case GS Richcopy 360 saved a lot of my time by speeding up the file transfer and backup process. Although it is a paid software but it saves a lot of time and effort, its error handling and GUI is also very good. Give it a try!

7

I recently did a test trial with large (several gigabyte) files and a recompiled version of midnight commander over ssh, using a known fast USB3 device. (MC lets you see what the actual transfer speed is. This was from the internal HDD to the USB3 device, as I wanted to go on vacation and needed to take some data with me.)

Transfer speed would start at approx USB2.0 speeds (20mb/sec territory) then drop into higher end USB1.1 speeds(5-6mb/sec) after about 20 seconds.

I suspect this might have something to do with how the SoC does caching and system IOs. If so, then similar IO throttling would be observable from other storage devices. Sadly, the MyCloud’s memory compliment is so… Underwhelming, that I really could not try a tmpfs backed transfer to see if it is an IO-bound problem. It could just be a dodgy driver for the USB3 hardware though. More testing would be required.