WD MyCloud 4TB NAS agonizingly slow

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
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I’m a computer professional of 30 years, home network setup clean and error free.

I attached this 4TB drive and my main computer (Windows 7) found it immedidately and I created a temp directory fine.

Am only using this drive as a simple archive, do not need cloud capabilities, but copying files, some pretty large,

is agonizingly, soul-crushingly slow…even a 1k file.  Pretty sure this is not a Gigabit vs 100Base issue.

Even in a shell, just changing directory to it is sssslllloooowwwww.  Changing directory to another NAS drive is normal.

Setup:

  Dell Precision running Win7

  Netgear router

  Netgear switch

Because I was out of ports on the router, I just plugged into a connected switch/hub.  Like I said, initially,

everything seemed fine, but after trying to copy stuff, now slow.  I rebooted my computer just to eliminate,

but it was never slow when dealing with any other network connection,etc…FireFox/web performance not affected.

I could try to connect it directly to router, but I doubt that’ll make a difference.

I’m wondering if I need to configure the MyCloud drive?..I didn’t because heck it found it on startup, and seem ok.

But at this speeed, it’s NOT useable. 

When something *is* copied to it,…in my Explorer window, slow green progress bar works it way across,…takes almost a minute…

Does anybody have a fix for this? Or can suggest something to try? Is WesternDigital out there somewhere?

Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated,

Thanks,

JP

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JPolk wrote:> Pretty sure this is not a Gigabit vs 100Base issue.

I could try to connect it directly to router, but I doubt that’ll make a difference.

But there must be something maybe not a Gb vs. 100 but more steps you put in the middle more places to mess with transfer speed.

Mine gives me 50 MB second sustained up or down.

Try it, nothing to loose.

If it’s possible test with only MyCLoud, Router and computer, disable antivirus/security suite/ windows firewall and router firewall (disconnect internet access during test if you are worried).

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Make sure all your ethernet cables to and from the router and to and from the modem are at least cat5e and that you are using the supplied ethernet cable that came with MyCloud or better, (if you have them) then I would also advice you to go into your control panel on  your Windows 7 and then go into the “services” section and you need to make sure that the following 4 settings are set to “Automatic” and that they are (even) started:

  1. DHCP Client
  2. NET TCP Port Sharing Service
  3. SSDP Discovery
  4. UPnP Device Host

Doing the above helped vastly improve my transfers to and from MyCloud, Of course I would also suggest anyone experiencing slow transfers to ensure they have a Gigabit capable router too.

1 Like
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i have a mac, don’t have those options. TIme Machine not usable

rob

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edroblern wrote:

i have a mac, don’t have those options. TIme Machine not usable

 

rob

You don’t have windows system but OP has and he asked for his problem and we try to help him. :slight_smile:

Open a new thread with your own question.

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Dude!..you are a genius!

Of the four services you listed, #2 was off entirely, the others were in manual mode…

Setting all four to Automatic, rebooting my computer, and power-cycling the drive seems to have done the trick.

I also ran “mc_windows_setup.exe” (available from this site)…and this time it completed.  During initial installation

I did *not* run this this…and the instructions said nothing about it.  I found it during troubleshooting stage…when I

ran it before, it got to step 3, then error’d out.  Now, it finished,…setting up the cloud stuff,etc…

Now, in Explorer window,…I can easily change directory up and down a tree and it’s as snappy as any other drive…

woooohoooo!  Imma happy camper now!

RealAct, Thank you very, very much :slight_smile:

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One last question though,…during the run of “mc_windows_setup.exe”,…there’s a checkBox that enables/disables

automatic firmware update…I disabled that (as I don’t like nasty surprises)…but in hindsight, I wonder if I should

leave it that way.  Used to be…firmware updates can be dangerous, if not done right or interupted can render a

device useless…what’s the conventional wisdom on this issue vis-a-vis WD drives…?

Thanks!

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You are right, firmware update is not a trivial thing to leave it auto.

Personnally i always download firmware and update manually after making a backup like i do with other devices who has firmware like routers.

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I was very encouraged to see this post because it is the exact issue I am having with my new 4TB MyCloud. 

Everything on my mac is working as expected speed wise but my Windows 7 Desktop is painfully slow. 

How painful?  3Mb transfers.  Totally unacceptable.  

My findings were exactly as JPolk after correcting that and rebooting the drive and PC I have the same results. 

Slow. 

This happens via mapped drive or theough the My Cloud desktop app. 

Any other suggestions? 

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I had the same problem until I turned off windows defender real time scan. File transfer speeds went WAY up after that.

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Same situation… all connections are gigabit, static ip, but Mycloud is very slow… 30 seconds just for open a folder…

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I’ve had similar issues with extremely slow file access issues and the WD UI being painfully slow.  Speeds in the range of 50KB/sec - 500KB/sec.   Eventually, after 7 months of use, I couldn’t tolerate this anymore as I needed to recover 100GB’s of data and it took 2 days to copy it from the drive.   All connections are Gigabit.   I finally RMA’d the device and while waiting for the replacement and trying to securely delete data from the drive I found the issue.

When logged in via SSH to the drive directly, performance was still slow and after allowing the ‘shred’ command to run for 3 days with very little progress I decided to dig a little deep and start shutting off services.

After issuing the “top” command I observed that multiple Apache2 instances were running and the CPU wait time (wa stat) was in the 95%+, meaning the CPU is doing a lot of waiting on disk I/O access.  Stopping Apache resolved the issue and performance significantly increased.  (issue the command: #  /etc/init.d/apache2 stop )   Note: I also stopped or killed “wdmcserver”, “twonkyserver”, and “itunes”, but the performance increase was noticed when stopping apache.

After stopping apache, I was able to complete the process of deleting all files.  I then rebooted and powered through the UI to delete the Share I had added.  I stopped Apache again and performance increased significantly and I was able to copy 30GB’s in about 30 seconds.

After rebooting again, the drive is now working great even with Apache running.   So, maybe the issue was related to adding an additional share?  I believe “media serving” and “public access” were enabled for the new share.  That may have also contributed. 

So, now I’m wondering if the issue may have been related to adding a new share with the “media server” option enabled?  I’m not sure, but I thought this information may be helpful to others in diagnosing their slowness issues.

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Setting the four services to automatic worked for me!!!