WD2Go Access unacceptably slow

Dear friends,

I paid about $500 for my 6TB WD Duo Live so I can backup files from different locations.  I am seriously disappointed in this product and WD customer service.  I often get about 2kb/sec transferring files.  I have tried playing with UPNP, and also forwarding ports manually, and all seems fine as far as the firewall goes when I log into the hard drive (no relay connection)…

2kb/sec!!!  Ridiculous …  It is consumer fraud to even offer this product for sale and advertise remote access.  I’m not behind any crazy firewalls, and I’m pretty well versed with networking.  I have comcast internet at both locations. 

I contacted customer support and got a generic form answer.

I am out $500 …  Unless there is a solution, people should stay away from this garbage device.

this is NOT the standard performance on this

we are looking at a serious issue with firewall or internet security 

check this article for more information 

are you connecting from work or a public computer?

No firewalls, I installed the network at both locations.  I have a DIR-655 D-link at one location, and a Linksys wrt54gs2 at the other … both very common routers.  I know the linksys is not the best router but it is very common and works. 

Here’s the deal and what I’ve concluded.  Maybe you can tell me if I am wrong.   I can get faster upload speeds, but the handshaking that goes on per file is so ridiculously slow, that backing up a large amount of files is virtually impossible.  Therefore, on average, when I am transferring multiple files, I average 2k/sec.  I can see each file name pop up that transfers, and I see how painfully slow it moves from file to file.  If I were to transfer a small number of large files, then yes, it seems that the transfer speed is acceptable (nothing impressive or even close to what my bandwidth should allow but acceptable).   Transferring just a few gigs of documents or photos is practically impossible, and that is unacceptable.  That is what most people buy this product for and you essentially can’t do it.  For now I will zip some of the documents and transfer them that way, but I shouldn’t have to do that.  This device was supposed to simplify things for me, not make them more complicated,

you can also try FTP and see if the connection is better 

the only downsize with FTP is that you can download files from the drive but not upload…

I’m just trying to see if you experience a better performance there so that way we can pinpoint the error to the application or the drive 

If FTP doesn’t support upload then I can’t really narrow anything down because the whole problem is with uploading large numbers of files.  Anyone else care to use WD2go to upload a large amount of small files and see what speed you get?

i have the same problems:

speed is ok with larger files,

but extremely !!! slow with many small files  (about 2k  oder less)

your guess, carnerd, that handshaking could be very slow, seem a plausible explanation to me

i started the tranfer of thousands of very small doc and jpf-files on friday, and it finished  on sunday …

very very poor … 

no problem with the very big files

Well, this type of performance parity is actually quite common. It’s not just a WD 2go issue. If the latency across a network is high, the protocol will struggle with the setup/tear down of each transfer and can never “ramp up” the transfer rates.