Recently with my switch over to fibre I’ve been enjoying the feeling of speed of light until I decided to try out VPN which instantly brought my connection speed down to 68kb/s. Of course not everything is connected at 68kb/s, just certain activities.
While it is true that VPN can protect you as an anonymous user on the internet, it is like connecting to the internet via your grandma’s house of which she is connected through her dial-up modem.
This brings my post to my old My Cloud that is now gathering dust in my storage bins but I do recall that openVPN was used to connect My Cloud to the clouds and in previous times when I was with Shaw, my max upload speed was probably 2Mbps so it really didn’t matter.
With WD, limits are everything and they never waste a single bit of hardware when they think they can reduce the price by eliminating things like extra colour leds so that we now only have the colour red in the My Cloud 2 which stands for everything from bad hard disk to no ethernet connection.
I remember when the first gen My Clouds had a gigabit ethernet limit of about 45MB/s or thereabouts. USB 3 could give you between 80 to 100 MB/s transfer rate. However if you plugged your USB 3 drive into the back port of your My Cloud and since your ethernet transfer rate is maxed out at 45MB/s anyways, WD limited the USB 3 transfer rate to 45MB/s also; I know that because I tried transferring from the my Cloud to the connected USB 3 drive via SSH copy command and timed the transfer speed. However I do admit that I was using a non WD USB drive at the time so that was also another factor that WD limits you. I was using a Raid 0 on two disks giving me 120MB/s read writes when connected directly to a MacBook USB 3.
Which brings me back to VPN and WD Cloud connection.
Several factors limits the speed rate of the cloud, your phone which is either connected to a star bucks wifi, LTE or even just 3G/2G then connecting through WD servers which either gives you a either a dynamic IP service which passes you directly to your My Cloud via your IP or connects you through a VPN.
If it is the latter then if there are multiple USERS connected to WD then your speed will vary and/or your speed may be govern by the fact that your my cloud is/was limited to your ISP upload speed anyway, so WD just sets the limits to a known limit anyways.
I did see openVPN in the jobs from time to time so I have to assume that the WD servers are providing more than just dynamic DNS services.
If anyone knows for sure, go ahead and post up.
Anyways, the My Cloud is probably at the end of life anyways and from another post the servers are no longer connecting to your My Clouds for external access, although this also hasn’t been confirmed either.
I can only imagine the max speed for the My Cloud Home if they do use VPN; the bottleneck would be WD; well the bottleneck has always been WD but with VPN I can only imagine the 68kbs.
Let me know what you know…
