Very poor Time Machine performance compared to Time Capsule :(

I’ve been using my MBL for a few months just for storage/archivation and it’s worked great so far, with performance similar to that of my 2TB Time Capsule which I have been using for Time Machine backups instead.

I am now looking to move my iTunes and iPhoto libraries to the Time Capsule since they are quickly outgrowing my MBP’s 256GB SSD drive, and I want to use the Time Capsule for this instead of the (bigger) MBL due to iPhoto requiring a HFS+ formatted drive (I don’t want to use disk images that I would have to manually mount etc).

Because of this, I would like to use the MyBook Live for Time Machine instead, and use the Time Capsule for libraries and data. Problem is, while I tried it and it seems to work correctly when I select the MBL in Time Machine, the performance is very poor :frowning:

With the MBL NAS, Time Machine does backups 2/3 times slower than with the Time Capsule. 

Everything is Gigabit, and the weird thing is that when I for example transfer single large files to/from the MBL, I see transfer rates of up to 45 MB/sec which is more or less what I’d expect. So it doesn’t look like it’s a throughput issue.

The poor performance seems to only affect Time Machine backups. Any ideas? Has anyone else made a comparison with both drives, using Time Machine?

Just for reference my MBL has the latest firmware and seems to be working great otherwise.

Any help much appreciated.

Vito 

This is normal and due to the EXT3 file system of the MBL, which is slower for TM backups than HFS+; a file system TM was designed and optimized for (Thanks Apple :dizzy_face: **blatant sarcasm** ). Test it yourself, format a drive as HFS+ and test it, then forma the same drive as EXT3 on Linux and test it.