WD My Cloud vs WD My Book

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

I am looking at 3 different storage devices but I’m really hoping for an ethernet gigabit device, regardless the storage will be on my router for easy access which also is beautiful since my laptops USB ports are trashed and faulty and pretend that they are only 1.1 instead of the 2.0 that they are supposed to be. I have a laptop which the USB ports are also not replaceable since the chassis of the computer is pretty compound into one big thing.

My devices I’m thinking about are:

WD My Book 4TB (USB 3.0)

WD My Book Live (Ethernet)

WD My Cloud (Ethernet)

I hope to use Ethernet of course, but what is technically faster? USB 3.0 or gigabit ethernet?

I have read many of the complaints about all WD NAS storage devices, like slow transfer rate and unreliability - and I can understand that if your router doesn’t have gigabit ports - or that the computer doesn’t have a gigabit network card. I am planning on using the router soley wirelessly, and very rarely using an ethernet cord from the router to the laptop.

Is that something idea?

I do not care for using FTP or accessing it from anywhere over the world, even though the drive would support it and my router also supports cloud and FTP features - but none of that is a big concern for me. It may be nice but I don’t know how to do that so it’s not a huge concern right away.

My router is the NETGEAR AC1900 Nighthawk, it has all 4 or maybe 5 gigabit ethernet ports. My laptop though I have no recollection if it has a gigabit network card or even if that has a factor through wireless - or what consequences that has. I know with my USB I only get around 2.03mbps transfer speed and when transfering from my laptop through the USB 3.0 1TB Passport Ultra, and the transfer speed going to the router through the USB to the drive was 1.5mbps (so slightly slower than purely using USB).

What should I get?

2

I have had 2 of 2TB My Book Live.  They have been doing good job; however, I do not use them much.

Recently, I purchased My Cloud 4TB (a good deal from BestBuy.com for 149.00).  After receiving this unit, I start merging many external hard drives to this NAS.  At the beginning, I did not think this device is in good performance.  You might ask why I bought this - just because of the price is the cost of an internal hard drive so I got it.

From my laptop Dell E6400 transfer via Ethernet connection from an WD 2TB external to 4TB My Cloud.  I could get up to 12MB/s (MegaByte not MegaBit).  This is a excelent rate.

FYI, in advance to get better performance beyond the 100Mbps bottle neck, you should be sure all connectivity and switch/router are capable at Gigabit transfer include the Ethernet cable.

Currently, my network bottle neck is the 10/100 switch.  I did some experiment w. different type of cable.  I figured truly that the cheap cable or portable will yield high perfomance.

I have used many different NAS for awhile:

  • Maxtox Share Storage II (MSSII) (later was Seagate)

  • Seagate

  • Iomega

  • Buffalo LinkStation (LS), LS Pro (single, duo, quad)

  • Pogoplug, Pogoplug Pro

  • WD My Book Live

  • WD My Cloud

MSSII was great and fast but had no cloud and dies without giving will

Seagate, Iomega were wasting money

Buffalo LS and LS Pro is OK; however, usually got problem of timing issue on sleep and documentation are not clear

Pogoplug is not truely NAS; however, it supports cloud and at local, it depends on their propietory software in order to read their device.  This is slow, especially when read out from it.

WD My Cloud, I would rate about the MSSII and even better w. Cloud support.  The drive wake up faster.  As up to now, I am very please w. it.

I also have some experience of taking of warranty w. WD.  They take care within the warranty time pretty good.  Not like Seagate w. some unclear information then caused me hug money.  They replaced a failed device w. a reconditioned then charged w. high price more than the new and larger capacity.

I am not a fan of people who are very often upgrading the firmware.  I only upgrade as need.  Yes, like the other folk mentioin about the firmware issue.  All products has problem, particularly in Computer industry for both hardware and software.  No one dare to claim their product is bug free or have no trouble.  The matter is they don’t want to tell you or even high these away as much as they could.  I had been computer engineer and system engineer in both hardware and software for 10 years so I know what it is.  I have no relation w. WD; however, I only speak out what I know.

I have used many of WD External and internal hard drives from 1TB, 1.5TB, 2TB, 3TB all w. 64MB buffer (green version) they are performed great fast and reliable.  I even use 4x 2TB green version to buy the Buffalo LS Quad NAS.  It is reliable and fast.  I did not listen to any other folk from some other forum said, need to use the red or black version when using in NAS.  I can cut down to 50% or even more; however the perfomance still great.  I had done w. alot of large video test so I know what it is.

I would recommend WD My Cloud is a good investment if you want to use it (not try it).

Storage over network is always better than USB connection because you can get data every place within the network without depending on any computer system to be on at the time you retrieving data.  Again, all hardware, cable configuration has to be right equipment in order to get high rate.

Hopefully, this can give you some idea to make a better call and spend the right money at one time.

1 Like
3

Hmm, my laptop and router have gigabit 10/100/1000 ports. But either my computer is faulty or my router is faulty. Either way there is no way to fix it but no matter what I do the fastest way I can transfer anything is USB 2.0 (even though my USB ports call themselves 1.1) - but with that I am able to get around 13mbps on a good day. Sometimes my transfer rate through USB is only 500kbps or up to 1mbps. But even using the 200 dollar high speed router, I generally only get 2-3mbps. When I’m plugged into the router directly with gigabit cat5e ethernet, I get around 8mbps.

If people knew how long it took for me to transfer over 150GB, it would blow their mind because sometimes it can take 7 hours or the last time I did it it took me around 23 hours to transfer 150GB. Most people are able to transfer 200GB in 2 hours or faster. So something is wrong. But I apparently get no support at all for my router because NETGEAR support is trash and I bought the router from Newegg.com but they say that newegg isn’t an official resaller - and then I went to newegg and they said I was 2 days beyond my 30 day return period because I was spending so much time trying to get support from crappy NETGEAR.

But my laptop has as mentioned before USB 1.1 (supposed to be 2.0), I have a low speed harddrive that’s a ATA 250GB HD. My wireless network adapter is 10/100, NOT n wireless.

But thank you, I think when I can afford it I’ll invest in a My Cloud - but now I’m thinking of buying a new computer, hopefully a cheap 500-600 dollar gaming desktop. Something just enough that I can upgrade it over time.

4

Hello internal.memory…

if your laptop and router are both gigabit, then if you have a WD Cloud or a NAS device that is also gigabit, then try removing all or any othe devices connected to the router other then your laptop and the NAS.

Then reboot the router with only the gigabit devices.

Now try testing the speeds.

If you have a mix of 100Mbit and gigabit, your network slows down to the lowest denominator.

Good luck…

5

internal.memory,

You can also try to connect your WD My Cloud directly to RJ45 port in your laptop.

It works for me well, i’m getting speed rate about 32MB/s

6

You ask "I hope to use Ethernet of course, but what is technically faster? USB 3.0 or gigabit ethernet? , . . "

I’m not sure, and I am no IT professional,  but I believe Ethernet comes in 3 flavors: 

-  10,

-  100 &

-   Gigabit or 1000 bit speed.  8 bits to the byte, so a Gigabit/8 should be = 125 MBytes

USB 3.0 is, “technically” supposed to be capable of upto 5 Gigabits, or @ 625 MBytes. 

I gather USB 3.0 usually falls a bit short of its full potential for various reasons, but all in all, is capable of faster transfer speeds than Gigabit ethernet.   If I’m wrong in this, hopefully someone better versed in bits, bytes & speed will correct me.  

Wikipedia indicates USB devices came online @ 1996 originally as a v1, which very quickly got an update to v1.1  It now comes in at least five flavors or speeds.  The original, “low” or v1 I gather was capped at 1.5, version 1.1 of “full” bumped that speed up to 12.0 Mbits or @12.0 MBytes/s, “Hi” USB, v2.0 went to 480 Mbits/s or 60 MBytes if I’m reading the charts correctly, and USB 3.0 is supposed to have the potential to run @ 10x USB 2.0 at 625 Mbytes.   Presently waiting in the wings is a proposed USB 3.1 which may compete with Thunderbolts at 10 Gbits/sec, 1200 Mbytes

HTH

7

Any idea if you can connect directly to the USB port on the My Cloud drive and transfer files to/from the drive via your OS (Windows 7 File explorer in my case) without going through the NAS functions and a router hub or ethernet port?  In other words simpy use the MyCloud drive just like a simpler MyBook USB 3.0 at least initially?  In trying to search and browse around this forum, I think I am hearing this either is NOT possible, or if it is, it is NOT a good idea if one ever wants to try to use the NAS functions as it (?) creates some kind of massive indexing problem which tends to crash the system and lock the drive up? 

Thanks for any light on this.  Cheers