Western Digital My Book Live 3tb slow speed

WD Legacy Products My Book Live
1

I purchased a WD MBL and I’ve received it. I connected it to my modem/router and set it up, but when I transfer files from my pc to the WD drive, the transfer rate is between 1mb/s and 3mb/s (really slow) and it should be about 100mb/s as advertised. I’ve make a little research and found 2 things: I have modem with fast ethernet ports speed (10/100) and the router has connection to 802.11g. I realized it is a little bit old but I want to know what do I need more to improve the transfer speeds. I can tell that with 10/100 speed and 802.11g connection my transfer rate is 2mb/s most of the time, I want to know what would be my transfer speeds with:

a) 10/100 speed and 802.11n connection
b) 10/100/1000 (gigabit) speed and 802.11g connection
c) 10/100/1000 (gigabit) speed and 802.11n connection

Thanks for your time

2

c) 10/100/1000 (gigabit) speed and 802.11n connection

Limited by the 802.11n to about 6MB/s (from experience) if operating in the 5GHz band.

a) 10/100 speed and 802.11n connection

Ditto.

b) 10/100/1000 (gigabit) speed and 802.11g connection

About 2 to 4 MB/s.

Run a wire for faster speeds.  

You’ll get about 10MB/s on 100 Megabit network, and you’ll hit the disk limit on the Gig network of around 30 to 60 MB/s.

3

Just to interject here since Windows actually displays transfers in MB (MegaBytes), not mb (MegaBits), 2mb is significantly different from 2MB.

1MB is ~ to 8Mb.

The My Book Live can achieve up to 100Mb read speed with an optimal Gigabit network. Most users will see 30-60Mb on a Gigabit network. If you’re still on a 10/100 the most you will see for Write is 10-15Mb. Read is usually much faster than Write.

If you want to test all these factors, there’s a free program that will do a write to any network device with whatever size file you specify. Since file transfer speeds are also affected by the size of the file, you’ll need to take that into account.

http://download.cnet.com/LAN-Speed-Test/3000-2085_4-10908738.html

4

OK mstargard, so the MB/s you’re telling me are megabits or megabytes? Just to get clear. Thanks

5

so Laura_F, in theory the drive supports up to 12.5MB/s (100mb/s) but usually it goes from 3.75MB/s (30mb/s) to 7.5MB/s (60mb/s) on a 10/100/1000 (gigabit) connection and from 1.25MB/s (10mb/s) to 1.875MB/s (15mb/s) on a 10/100 connection? So, the 802.11n or 802.11g connection does not make any difference?  Correct me if I’m wrong in anything, thanks.

PD: I bought the drive from amazon and one of the pictures displays 100MB/s speed and before the image, quote “this product delivers read speeds up to 100 MBps.”    There’s a problem with that, right?

6

MB = MegaBytes

Mb = Megabits

MB/s = MegaBytes per second

Mb/s = Megabits per second

Generally, you can take a network speed, such as 100 Megabits per second and simply divide by 10 to get the MegaBytes per second expected throughput.  It’s not really that simple, but it’ll give you an idea of what you’re working with.

M.

7

“So, the 802.11n or 802.11g connection does not make any difference?  Correct me if I’m wrong in anything, thanks.”

By far, the wireless protocols offer much lower throughput than using a wire.  The difference between 802.11g and n is not as great as you might have hoped in practical terms.  802.11g has a max signalling rate of 54Mb/s per channel, which translates to about 5MB/s throughput in theory.  I never get anywhere near that.  At best I’ve gotten about 2.5MB/s over g.

Wireless n has two flavours.  It can use the older 2.4GHz spectrum, which is crowded and noisy, or the 5GHz spectrum which has a lot more room.  In the 5GHz spectrum, base signalling rates can be as high a 450Mb/s which would lead you to believe that you can get rates around 50MB/s.  This just doesn’t happen in practice.  I get rates between 5MB/s and 10MB/s in that band.

Your data rate will be limited by the slowest link in the path between your computer’s hard disk and the MBL’s hard disk.  If you’re using wireless networking, then it’s the wireless network that’s the limiting factor.

If you’re using a Gigabit wired network and a laptop computer, then your rate will be limited by your laptop’s slow 5400RPM hard disk to something around 15MB/s.

“PD: I bought the drive from amazon and one of the pictures displays 100MB/s speed and before the image, quote “this product delivers read speeds up to 100 MBps.”    There’s a problem with that, right?”

The technical part:

The product will deliver 100 MegaBytes per second throughput under the correct conditions.  

  • You’ll need a decent quality Gig switch, or connect directly to the MBL with a crossover, and be using Cat 5e or Cat 6 cable of the correct length, and be able to accept 100MB/s at the receiving end.
  • The internal hard disk cannot physically support reads from the platter at a sustained rate of 100 MB/s, however, it has a cache.  Additionally, there are filesystem caches in the MBL.  If these are primed, then you can read at way more than 100 MB/s - probably beyond a GB/s, *HOWEVER* your read limit will be limited by the Gig network card in the MBL to 100MB/s.

So to summarize, you can get the maximum advertised speed emptying the cache of the MBL under the correct conditions.

The legal part:

I don’t speak for WDC, but when I see that a device or service will deliver speeds *up to* some value, I interpret that to mean it will deliver speeds less than or equal to the advertised value.  Internet Service Providers quote the same kind of thing and rely on that detail of wording to justify network management practices that throttle the rate of some services to less than 1% of the advertised maximum speed.

That’s life, I guess.

8

The Read speeds will be significantly higher than the Write speeds. Since Read speeds are usually fairly invisible, the tool I linked in a previous post (from Cnet) will show you both read and write speeds. Another point on that is due to the cache, the file size will also make a difference. If you want to see how the drive sustains reading and writing of larger files, you’d set the application up with a larger sized file.

9

thanks mstargard, I connected my laptop via ethernet cable to my router and copied files to the My Bool Live and get a speed of about 10MB/s most of the time. Is there a way to reach or be near that speed wirelessly? If there is, a 10/100 router with 802.11n would do it, or would I need a gigabit router with 802.11n. Thanks for your time. I have about 5 days understanding about 10/100 and gigabit routers and the differences between 802.11 n/g/a/b. Sorry if I’m asking something you’ve already told me.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that when the file is at 97% to be copied completely, the speed drops to 23KB/s, both wiereless and wired, so the transfer takes about an hour more. Is there something wrong with this? (The file I copied both times for wireless and wired is about 12.3GB)

10

chuythebestone wrote:

thanks mstargard, I connected my laptop via ethernet cable to my router and copied files to the My Bool Live and get a speed of about 10MB/s most of the time. Is there a way to reach or be near that speed wirelessly? If there is, a 10/100 router with 802.11n would do it, or would I need a gigabit router with 802.11n. Thanks for your time. I have about 5 days understanding about 10/100 and gigabit routers and the differences between 802.11 n/g/a/b. Sorry if I’m asking something you’ve already told me.

 

Another thing I’ve noticed is that when the file is at 97% to be copied completely, the speed drops to 23KB/s, both wiereless and wired, so the transfer takes about an hour more. Is there something wrong with this? (The file I copied both times for wireless and wired is about 12.3GB)

You’ll need to figure out what your wireless client is capable of before making a decision on what to buy.  I needed to replace the wireless card in my laptop to get wireless n in the 5Ghz range, which cost about $30CDN.  As I mentioned, you’ll get speeds around 5 to 10 MB/s doing that.

It doesn’t matter much if you have a fast (100Mb/s) or Gig (1000Mb/s) switch if you’re just going to use it for wireless.  One thing to look out for is that some of the new linksys routers can only do wireless n in 2.5GHz or 5GHz bands, but not both simultaneously.  (the E2000, for example)  That means that if you have just one wireless client that negotiates in the 2.4GHz band, then all the devices must run in that band.

I bought a linksys E3000 which does everything, and is a Gig switch and it performs quite well.  Also, I replaced the vendor’s firmware with dd-wrt, which might not interest you, however it means that I can’t comment on how the vendor’s firmware performs.  I usually seek out routers that can run dd-wrt because I have a need for many of the extra features it offers.

With wireless N, the number of antennas matters.  One is basic, two is good, three is excellent.  The more antennas, the better the bandwidth.  It’s something call MIMO, which leverages differences between the antennas to improve performance.  The same thing with the client side.  Both ends must be up to the task.

About the 97% thing - that’s probably an artifact on how your OS is calculating the completion percent.  Windows is historically bad at this.  Other OS’s can do the same thing.  The only way to be really sure about data rates is to monitor the network directly.  dd-wrt can do this at the router.  Windows, I think, has a network rate monitor, and Linux has a multitude of utilities, some graphical, and some from the command line.

One possible reason this happens is because when you copy a file, the local buffers will fill before any significant quantity of data is transferred over the network.  This buffer fill happens at memory and disk speeds, and this can be quite a lot of data; perhaps several Gigs.  Then the buffers fill, and the network becomes the limiting factor.  But as far as your copy utility is concerned, more of the file has copied than really has because much of it is in the local buffers.  This skews the percent complete and the overall data rate in favour of completion.  Then when the data is almost finished copying there should be an aknowledgement from the remote side that the copy is complete, but this won’t happen until the local buffers have emptied.  Hence the %complete appears to stall.

M.

11

based on what you’re saying here, the slow speeds i’ve seen transferring files is due to wireless technology limitations, correct ?

then in this case it is false advertising for many nas manufacturers who play up the 1000 Mbps card, when they don’t bother translating max throughput of the NAS over wifi into actual MB/sec. which is what most users need to know before buying. the point is to buy an NAS, plug it in and walk away, working wirelessly via pc. but the advertised speeds will only be seen when the device is directly plugged into the pc being used.

i’ve been getting 3-6 MB/sec. transfer speeds of large files over wifi with a new DIR-825 router. regardless of working with g or n (2.4 and 5). when i plug the drive directly into my laptop i see speeds around 40 MB/sec.

this is really rediculous. if you have 500 GB of data to send to the drive you have to walk over and physically run wire between the drive & pc, because if you wanted to do it over wifi you’re looking at 30 hours.

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I can get about 6MB/s on my previous router, and 12MB/s with Apple Extreme Base Station.

13

on second thought, i don’t think it’s a limitation of the wireless technology more than a limitation in the TCP protocol used. in researching this, i have spotted people saying they don’t experience this kind of issue when using linux. so maybe it’s the protocol that is used in windows that may be causing the bottleneck ?

14

can a wd employee maybe chime in on this ? i’ve gone back and forth and spoken with some folks that do networking for a living … i have trouble figuring out how the connection in my router tells me i am @ 104 MB/s, but windows can only push 5-6 MB/s to the drive when sending files wirelessly ? when directly connected to the computer via ethernet cable, i see 40 MB/s.