My transfers speed dropped from ~60MB/s to ~10-20MB/s via SMB/FTP. Nothing has changed, router, RJ45 cable is the same. My desktop PC’s operating system is same etc.
Faulty drive maybe? Tho disk heatlh is “healthy” according to adminpanel.
Small but numerous files (photos) copy slower than larger but fewer batches of files (videos) do, because of more disk file seeking for the smaller files. This could have been the case for the disparity.
I mostly work with ~100MB files and larger >3.5GB files, so that’s not it in this case. Also while I transfer files now, browsing NAS is muuch slower than before while trasferring (via SMB).
EDIT: After doing absolutely nothing, speeds are back. WTF.
Question: Did you copy video files ONTO the box?
The DLNA server just LOOOOOOOOOVES to index video, audio, and picture files, and it generates thumbnails when it does. When it does that thing, it gobbles down a bunch of resources and chews on the disk pretty hard.
Off NAS. I have Plex installed on my PC, which is looking for stuff from NAS, but I am not sure if it was doing something by automatic/scheduled, because for sure I did not order any tasks manually.
Make sure the cloud function is turned off too, unless you actually use it.
wdmcserverd and wdphotodbmergerd are system daemons that are to blame for the behavior I cited. They are used by the web interface for the cloud function, and are… Well… When they run, they can gobble up upwards of 300mb of RAM, and thrash the bejesus out of the disk.
Next time it happens, ssh into the box and see if those jerks are running. 
I had it on, turned it off now.
You seem to know about these stuff, so what is your opinion on Energy Saver / Drive sleep? Which one is more ‘bad’ for HDDs health; constantly on and spinning or drives starting multiple times a day?
Depends on how often the drive wakes.
Spinup is harmful, but constant operation also wears out the bearing assembly, and if the head is not properly parked, can damage the platter over time too. (Air bearings are NOT frictionless!)
WD does a pretty good job on drive manufacture, (as opposed to Seagate, which has an abysmal failure track record for certain models in the 3 to 4tb range; See the backblaze research log histories. I used to work for NetApp, and have some inside scoops on that; Certain models had a 400% increased chance of premature failure, and would fail under disk load, meaning rebuilding an array could have disks start dropping like flies. true story.) so they are not excessively predisposed to random failure from spinning idle that I am aware of. (this is not an endorsement, I have my own preferences, just that WD drives are not terrible)
If the drive powers down and stays powered down for days at a time, it is probably better for it to sleep. If it gets powered up frequently, the increased bearing wear from the spinup/spindown cycle will wear out it faster than leaving it at full power-on will.
(again though, those two jerkoff daemons will keep the drive from sleeping properly. There’s been… Lots of threads about that.)
Some days it might be quite a lot times when they wake up, so that’s why I’ve kept them spinning all the time. My drivers are 2 x 4TB WD Red.
I take it this is enough to turn the Cloud Access off (only thing I can find related to cloud access in Settings) Cloud Access / Cloud Service: Off?
Thank you for all the replys.
In a perfect world, disabling cloud services disables those two processes. In practice, it seems hit and miss.
So I need to dive into SSH and do some magic there?
EDIT: Looks like those are not running atm. Need to check next time I see some kind of degrade of performance if they’re present then.
Speeds ~11MB/s and services which were mentioned before, are not running. =/
Transferring big file, size of ~8GB. Constant 11MB/s~.
Huh… Dunno. (shrug)
I needed to copy my EX2 raid files to a new EX2 Ultra
I thought doing the copy directly from the USB external backup Mybook would be faster.
(using windows 10 drag to copy - not the backup/restore built in settings)
BUT doing EX2 network to EX2 Ultra drag and copy was almost 2x faster
–
Plan to us SSH route next time
Watch out if using a task to use the restore option to copy as you have to make the (backup part of the task FIRST) Then the (make task) will actually RUN with out telling it to run
Personally I would use rsync to do the transfer between two ex2 units. (I have a chroot installed on one, so I get the screen utility. Useful for really long duration SSH sessions.)
I found the problem. My PC was connected to router with 100Mbps link instead of 1.0Gbps link.
Don’t know why that had happened. I tried first upgrading LAN drivers and rebooting router. I got 1.0Gbps link back after replugging network cable.
Huh…
Maybe set the mycloud’s network settings to force gigabit instead of autonegotiate?
Perhaps your cable has an issue, and it dropped down connect rate?
NAS is forced to gigabit. It was my PC’s connection that was only 100Mbps. Need to keep an eye on link speed and try to figure out why it is dropping if it still does it.
PC is connected with a CAT6 S/FTP cable and NAS with a CAT6 FTP cable.
