I cannot understand why my doing any operation on the WD EX2 Ultra (or EX2) on my Mac (all of my Macs) is so slow. Does anyone have an explanation?
Speaking to a representative recently for another issue, I am under the impression that the Mac Finder (desktop) handling data on the drives is causing the slowness; that doing all operations from the EX2 Ultra dashboard makes operations faster and I found that to be true.
However it’s not practical.
Right now, I am duplicating a photo library that’s 106 GB on the NAS. I am doing that using OS X’s duplicate operation.
It’s taking 10 hours on the NAS to do this. My entire pipeline is gigabit ethernet.
I don’t know folks. I am sure these are fine drives for someone, but in a week and a half I have purchased an EX2 and EX2 Ultra to replace the EX2 and my experience with both has been more trouble than it’s worth to keep these units. I am trying to be patient with them, but simple operations like this should not take this long. Working in a web interface for everything is not practical.
Typically duplicating this much data on even an external drive connected to the Mac would take a matter of minutes.
I would love to be enlightened. Perhaps there’s something I am missing.
Are you and your cpmputers connected together in network at the gigabit speeds? Are you transferring by attaching the Ultra directly to EX2 or are you attaching it to a computer? Are both drive and computer USB3 devices? If any USB2 devices are involved, that is five times slower than USB3 devices. Also, connecting drive to computer rather than to the EX2 is faster through network.
I attain 113MB/sec transfer speeds by attaching a USB3 HD to my fast laptop, and transferring files from that drive via computer to NAS at gigabit. speed. I have a faster NAS than VERge, but you still should be getting better speeds depending upon how you are set up. Also, transferring photos is slower than, say. videos, because there is a lot of disk thrashing with small photo files vs larger video files, and that takes up time.
There’s a gigabit ethernet router between all devices; patch in via ethernet. I am not using any USB 3. That’s beside the point of the NAS.
I understand what you’re saying about photos, but seriously - 10 hours for duplicating 106GB on the same exact drive… That’s beyond unreasonable.
I’d be better off having a dedicated USB 3 drive or thunderbolt drive and just sharing it through my mac over the network. I’d get much better performance. I won’t get all the server and cloud services, but that’s not crucial. I mostly want shareable mired storage.
I manage computers and networked drives everyday being a motion picture editor professionally. I have never seen anything like this; how slow this is. Even if I were to add a hub into our gigabit network to slow things down just for kicks, it wouldn’t be this bad.
Sorry about USB drive, I got confused when you said “Ultra” since it is also a portable drive. Yea, you have the new EX2. Heck, this should not be a problem for you. I just can’t come up with a good answer, and if no one else does soon, it is a good time to get help from WD Support. If you live in US, give them a call during working hours so you can be helped by Level 2 support.
Try this one…
Please have a look here, just helped for my mycloud
http://shortattentionspade.com/how-to-make-your-wd-mycloud-■■■■-less-or-for-seo-purposes-improving-the-performance-of-your-wd-mycloud/#comments
and yes the 4 funny dots are supposed to spell s…u…c…//// k (sorry)
As he says login with SSH
and run these commands
(you can check it with the atop command)
Folks I solved the problem so I say emphatically:
THIS IS NOT A FAULT OF WESTERN DIGITAL, BUT INSTEAD IT IS MY HUMAN ERROR.
I did some more digging around and late at night noticed an amber color coming from the back of my router. I knew that meant the port was operating at 100 Mb/s instead of at gigabit ethernet speeds. Low and behold it was the cable going from my router to my Mac.
I swapped cables and the speeds increased dramatically - closer to normal speeds, but not as fast as direct attached drives. And here I am sitting waiting for my My Book Thunderbolt Duo drive to replace the EX2 Ultra. I figured I’d just get that for the speed and us OS X Server instead.
So now I have a decision (once the My Book Thunderbolt Duo gets here):
Keep the EX2 now that it’s working much faster with my Mac
Keep the EX2 if the fan is quieter than the My Book Thunderbolt Duo (yes this does matter to me due to where the drive is placed)
Go with the My Book Thunderbolt Duo and OS X Server (which I am very familiar with) which will give me better speed and sharing features.
…of course I’d likely use Wimoweh (a mac app )to control drive sleep energy savings since my understanding is the My Book Thunderbolt Duo has no separate settings.
