Good day,
We use the 8TB WD My Cloud EX2 device to do weekly backups that are kept off site, the device is brought in once a week to the office, typically on a Thursday, to do server backups (data one directional Synchronization).
The data synchronized every week to the WD My Cloud EX2 device is between 500GB to 700GB. That is a lot of data consisting of large files and very small files and it can take up to 2 days to complete over the LAN port (1Gbps).
Can this device not be configured to connected straight to our server via USB instead ? (if this is possible, this will decrease turnaround time significantly)
No, it cannot be. The USB ports on the EX2 are to attach additional USB 2/USB 3 hard drives to piggyback on the NAS…and not to attach directly to a computer.
Yes I understand that… the transfer speed via LAN is just not fast enough (this could also perhaps be related to the processing power of the unit struggling with file volume sequential through output)
I would have expected that the USB would have dual functionality, i.e. connect external devices and be able to be used as an uplink.
That’d be impossible. To do that, you’d need the USB ports to alter their behavior on the fly - by making the NAS server the host when attaching USB drives or by making another computer the host when attaching the NAS server to another computer via USB. You cannot have an USB controller be able to change the host on the fly - that behavior is burnt onto the circuitry of the hardware.
But you are right on your other point - the feeble CPU (as well as the small 512 MB memory) is largely to blame for the slow throughput. If you compare EX2 against better performing NASes, you’ll find most of them have Intel Atom CPUs amd some even have Intel i3 CPUs…but those more powerful hardware come at a higher price points. But the EX2 has been benchmarked to have some of the fastest transfer speeds in this class of low-powered NASes. Another factor, believe it or not in the data throughput is the router. See this post of mine → http://community.wd.com/t5/WD-My-Cloud-EX2/Very-fast-transfer-speed-58-6-MB-s/m-p/737810#M531
