jdeviney wrote:> What’s considered a normal file transfer rate for a USB 2.0 drive?
[Disclaimer: I’m far from an expert on these things, but I’m happy to report what I notice in day-to-day use.]
I usually go to Wikipedia for such things; it tells me the effective throughput of USB 2.0 is 35 MB/s. That sounds about right to me. Obviously, actual throughput depends on so many things, but I think that’s a good upper limit to the ballpark. I was getting consistent highs of 25-30 MB/s making file transfers between my My Cloud and the USB 2.0 drive attached to the My Cloud’s USB port. My guess is that it might have been a bit faster had the drive been plugged directly into my Mac’s USB port, but I could be wrong.
That’s interesting. I will have to do some more testing from my mac and windows machines. My file transfers are over WIFI but I have a new n class router that has been working great for all other applications.
It doesn’t matter. A wired Ethernet connection is always going to be faster than WiFi, unless something’s wrong (with the caveat that the latest WiFi protocal, 802.11ac is approaching wired speeds, from what I’ve heard). It doesn’t matter how new or good your 802.11 router is; an Ethernet cable will be faster. How much depends on a lot of things, but if all your networked gadgets are equipped for gigabit Ethernet, you’d see a jump of 2-3 times that of 802.11n. (Again, i’m no expert.)
That doesn’t sound good and I actually bought this NAS primarily to act as a media server, secondary for computer backups. I have DNLA and iTunes servers on and intend to leave them running.
To be honest, I don’t know precisely what the wdmcserverd and wdphotomergerd daemons do exactly (obvioulsy somthing with indexing/thumbnailing, but I don’t know what does what). Nor do I even know if media serving itself is actually disabled when those daemons are disabled. It kind of sounds like it would be, but I don’t know. Never tried it. Also, I don’t know if you have any DNLA devices you want to stream to; if not, you might consider bypassing the My Cloud’s serving features and instead manage all the streaming from iTunes itself. Works great for me with Home Sharing enabled in iTunes.
I also have separate NAS shares setup for different purposes. I use Public for media sharing - DNLA and iTunes. The other shares are for backup purposes only. In Dashboard there is the option to enable/disable DNLA/iTunes per share, correct? I only have that enabled for the Public share. In theory if I am doing large file transfers to a non-DNLA/iTunes enabled share then my performance should not suffer due to file scanning on the NAS, correct?
Incorrect, in my experience. When things started going south when I first began transferring data to the My Cloud, I knew it had something to do with the media sharing. I knew it was scanning stuff, not just copying it. So the first thing I did was turn off both the DNLA and iTunes servers from the Dashboard/browser. It had no effect. Perhaps the My Cloud was thinking, “Fine, I won’t serve your media. But I’m still gonna scan and thumbnail it…” So, yes, in my experience performance suffered a lot even when the DNLA/iTunes switches were OFF for all shares.
One thing that is lacking is the ability to tailor when or how often DNLA/iTunes scanning occurs. It would be nice to have more control over sleep or standby mode as well.
Indeed it would.
If my slow transfer speeds are due primarily to the DNLA/iTunes servers running I would definitely want a refund on this NAS. That’s why I bought it.
Well, as a last resort you might give things a whirl by leaving the media servers switched on for your Public share (or whatever), but still disabling the 2 daemons. The reason I went with the update-rd.c command (rather than the chmod option in the thread I mentioned) was because a) I don’t know squat about permissions, and they make my head hurt, and b) with update-rc.d, I believe that if you can just run it again but with “enable” rather than “disable” to turn everything back on again (may require reboot, I don’t know). No harm done, as far as I can tell.
And if you haven’t tried submitting a help ticket, I would encourage you to do so. As much of a fiasco as the v4 firmware release has been, all the of the WD support people I’ve been in contact with, via email and phone, have been incredibly helpful to work with. I don’t think they have much interest in helping Linux jockeys who’ve added all sorts of bells and whistles to the OS running on the NAS. But for regular folks that just want their box to work, they’ve proven in my experience to be very persistent and attentive. Even though I got my drive working again by rolling back to v3, they emailed no less than 3 times for a phone appointment before I finally wrote an email explaining that things were OK on my end. Even then I still got a call-back from a WD cusomer relations guy, who was genuinely sympathetic and nice. There’s a proces in place for problems, which sure seems to me to be working (and others on this forum have reported similar experiences). I’d give it a try if you haven’t already, and emphasize that you just want your NAS to work and are just a regualar guy (or gal, I don’t know) who hasn’t done anything “weird” to their device.
