What protocol should my iMac use to store data?

When I copy 1 GB amount of data to the WD MyCloudMirror it takes about 10 minutes. When I do this from a Windows 8 laptop this is about 1 minute and the same speed on my MacBook. Can it be the protocol that slows down the iMac? I see a lot of incoming messages on the Mac (up to the same amount as outbound), while on the two other machines this is almost only outbound traffic. The problem is that the speed is far too low and not stable. Hope a solution is available.

I am not really familiar with Mac but you should cause SMB or CIFS as file protocol.

I think Mac will use AFP as default: I thought that AFP was supported, am I wrong? I can read and write with the default protocol, it is just so slow.

The only way I know to connect with another protocol is to connect to a server (command-K in Finder) and type cifs://wdmycloudmirror-2.local or smb://wdmycloudmirror-2.local and the use that server as volume in Finder. In that way the speed is similar (not fast).

I connect as either Guest or registered user (the WD manual indicates that for Time Machine it must be Guest).

How can I see what the actually used protocol is: does WD have some diagnostic tool for that?

I’ve tried all three and no real difference in speed using a relatively new mac book. An old Mac Mini in boot camp is almost as fast as a PC W7 machine. It’s definitely a Mac problem but good luck getting Apple to fix it. I don’t think they care about getting other companies hardware to work with theirs, they’d rather sell you their own disc.

It does get weirder in that it seems to only affect some Macs and some NAS models. So there must be something specifics in OS/Mac/NAS combinations that’s messing up what are supposed to be standard protocols…