WD MyCloud Ex4 slowest 4bay Nas server?

swedro · March 13, 2014, 9:49am

How is this posible that WD is claimd that this is an fast nas server, if the te real world test are far worse then a

WD MyBook Live. and it’s said when you compare it to other devices in a banchmark.

WD mybook live 160$ 3TB (very old device)

WD mycloud ex4 360$ 0TB

http://www.wdc.co.nl/nl/products/products.aspx?id=1170

How is this posible ?

John1000 · March 14, 2014, 2:09am

Unfortunately, if you haven’t noticed already, the technology field has been revamped starting during the .com boom. Then came the .com bust. During this period, the technology field was flooded with sub-par engineers, architects, programmers, etc, primarily from third world countries. Oddly enough, even after the .com bust, the US gov’t kept the number of H-1B visas at the same level and has since increased the quota and continues to do so even when the unemployment rate in the US is as high as most of us can ever remember. When you see “top 5 jobs” on Yahoo these days, you still see technology careers ranked very high - even with the unemployment rate in those industries running 8% to 15% and probably higher. Since when are those unemployment rates acceptable, and in this case, touted as actually being good??? You couldn’t make this stuff up - go to school, take difficult classes, spend lots of money on tuition and books, and then try to enter a career that recently has had very high unemployment with wages getting pushed to the floor by third world countries flooding the market with cheap, inferior labor, work long hours with no overtime pay and little, if any, job security while the US gov’t promotes and encourages such activities. You can’t write this stuff, but Yahoo does, amazingly thinking that no one will notice.

So the answer to your question, I believe, can be traced back to the late 1990’s and early 2000’s and continuing through today. The industry has been flooded with too many people who are not trained well, and many don’t even possess the aptitude for the type of work and mindset it takes to deliver a technical product. It is scary what goes on in companies these days, and inept management continues to make unwise decisions based on the inaccurate, almost fraudulent, information passed up the chain at all levels of the technical team. And to top it all off, the US administration continues to push for more H-1B’s (hundreds of thousands more each year) to fill the jobs that apparently the 8% to 15% of capable and well-educated home-grown currently unemployed engineers who are citizens of the country are not capable of filling. No other industry would tolerate this type of treatment, and eventually, well know companies like WD may find themselves out of favor with the consumer and out of business. But consumers must finally get fed up and refuse to tolerate inferior products which, in the past, would have never made it to market due to an unskilled workforce let alone due to false advertising laws. Now days, it seems that anything goes.

Good question that we all should be asking and asking often. Hope I shed some light on the matter.

EX4Shot · March 14, 2014, 3:13pm

This NAS has been slow since its release. For a “High Performance”, “Ultimate Reliability” moniker to be emblazoned on it is pretty much fiction.

From a network benchmarks perspective. This unit is ranked absolute last since its launch when compared to all 4 bay units. It only rises a couple spots at #51 out of all 59 NASs reviewed. Even its newer EX2 sigbling is perfomring better on simmilar hardware and is placing at #42 of the 59. (Maybe the EX4 team can borrow some of thier developers?) (or if they are the same and just got lucky, maybe they need to do a code compare.)

Quoting source from “Small Net Builder” provides some interesting observations:

"I created the table below to compare the EX2 with Buffalo’s LS421e, Buffalo’s LS420, and Synology’s DS214se. All four of these devices are powered by the MarvellArmada 370. All are running at 1.2 GHz except the Synology DS214se, which is running at 800MHz.

The Synology is also running with another hardware handicap - it only has 256 MB of RAM, while the other three devices all have 512 MB. Also, for comparison, I included the EX2’s siblings, the EX4 as well as the original My Cloud. All performance reported in MB/s.

Rows:

File Copy Write

File Copy Read

RAID1 File Copy Write

RAID 1 File Copy Read

USB3 Backup - FAT

USB3 Backup - NTFS

iSCSI Writei

SCSI Read

50.6	54.5	55.8	53.3	55.2	57.5
62.5	66.1	64.2	95.8	101.3	93.6
N/A	N/A	54.6	51.4	53.6	56.1
N/A	N/A	85.5	88.1	102.8	92.3
N/A	15.2	18.8	17.5	N/A	N/A
N/A	16.6	21.1	20.0	N/A	N/A
N/A	37.9	49.3	N/A	N/A	47.9
N/A	49.8	56.5	N/A	N/A	53.7

Table 2: Performance Comparison

Several interesting results pop out of this table.

The EX2 File Copy Write is slightly better than the EX4 and is in line with the rest of the Marvell Armada 370 NASes.
At 64.2 MB/s, EX2 File Copy Read is significantly slower than the other Armada 370 based devices with Buffalo’s LS420 running almost 58% faster (101.3MB/s).
While RAID 1 File Copy Write results were fairly well clustered, again, the EX2 was at the bottom of the pack with 85.5 MB/s for RAID 1 File Copy Read. Apparently Synology’s slower clock speed and half the RAM didn’t hurt its performance too much.
The EX2 outperformed both the EX4 and the DS214se for iSCSI reads and writes.
The EX2 also outperformed the EX4 as well as the LS421e for both USB 3.0 backup tests."

And this is not even taking into account all the bugs we are seeing that impact those numbers. Real world it often different than benchmarks. In this case real world is a lot worse. (understanding of course all units have bugs.) (these just feel major and to some earlier comments, a device in its infancy.)

(table had invalid HTML, so didnt copy right. I broke out what columns are in top line and rows below it. (Ex4 is the second column.))

Chaos311 · March 16, 2014, 3:53pm

Those numbers are closer than I would have thought… it is interesting to see the Buffalo beating the Synology on read speeds… Would have lost money on that bet.

EX4Shot · March 17, 2014, 2:27am

Chaos311 wrote:

it is interesting to see the Buffalo beating the Synology on read speeds… Would have lost money on that bet.

Well not nessessarily. We are comparing apples to apples here. We are talking same platform/hardware simillar price points. Buffalo edges them out in this field, but you cant beat Synologys higher end like the DS412+ that I think is ranked #6 of the 56 NASs out there. And only at a modestly higher $600 pricepoint.

What this does PROVE from both buffalo & Synology is that this platform can perform better. Wake up WD.

Jumpman · March 25, 2014, 12:29am

Depending on the type of RAID mode you select, I find the EX4 to be extremely reliable. Due to the single processor and low RAM it’s not very fast at all if you’re managing large files. WD avoids putting the hardware specs in the product description because the RAM is very low and not expandable. If you’re dealing with small work-related office productivity files I find the EX4 operates pretty fast, but transferring larger files in excess of 1GB to the EX4 or between shares can be fairly slow.

I’m not sure what people refer to as “reliable”, but your RAID level will greately affect the speed and fault tolerance of the device in addition to the memory and processor. For ultimate reliability I would suggest the RAID 10 as it allows for the best possible fault tolerance (1-2 drives) depending on which drive fails and the set/stripe it belongs to. During a rebuild the remaining drives can be left vulnerable so RAID levels needs to be considered carefully if this is being used for critical data. The EX4 arrives in a RAID 5 which is not adequate for my personal needs so everyone should consider the pros and cons of each before building their own array.

netpro · March 29, 2014, 7:10am

EX4Shot wrote: