MAC OS changes to improve SMB MB Live performance – solution inside

WD Legacy Products My Book Live
1

Just bought a MBL and I’ve manage to transfer a few hundred GB of music to it without a problem.

The problem I do have is that if I go and browse through the music folders it takes a very long time to display the contents the first time I view the folder. This is the same whether it wired or wireless.

Is this normal? Very diappointing if it is!

Is there some sort of indexing going on each time I view a folder?

2

What do you mean by “A very long time?”

That’s a subjective term no one will be able to compare.  :)

3

I have a MyBook studio that is plugged into my router via usb and that displays the folder contents faster over wireless than the MBL plugged via cable. Same content as well as I just transferred everything from the MB studio to the MB Live.

The MBL is taking minutes where as the MB Studio via usb/wireless is taking seconds.

4

Yeah, MINUTES sounds really bad.

I wonder if the drive is still busy indexing the bunches of music you just put on it?

You could try DISABLING the media indexing for that share to see if performance improves…

5

Have another share with media serving set to none and have the same issues. Even tried disabling the twonky and itunes services but still have the same issues. No speed issues writing to disk just reading.

Anyone else with a Mac + Airport Extreme have this issue?

6

Oh, you have a MAC? 

There’s been LOTS of people reporting how bad SAMBA storage works with Mac OS X (don’t remember the versions…)

There’s another thread in here somewhere about that particular issue…

7

Did a little googling.

Check this link out. See if that helps solve your issues.

http://www.techkaki.com/2010/12/slow-samba-file-copying-speeds-in-mac-os-x/

8

Hi, thanks for your replies.

Tried all the SAMBA fixes but no joy.

I think that the connection is via AFP. This is what I get when I Get Info on the share:

afp://NAS._afpovertcp._tcp.local/Public/Shared Music

I’ll keep looking. Hopefully I’ll find something.

I’m a bit disappointed to be honest. It is sold as Mac compatible but this issue asks a real question about that!

9

Progress!!

Instead of using the default afp connection I connected using smb. At first there was no change but then found this:

http://www.techkaki.com/2011/05/snow-leopard-slow-browsing-of-smb-shared/comment-page-1/#comment-1181

Made the changes to the smb.conf file and restarted.

Now when viewing my iTunes Media/Music folder it takes half the time to load up all the initial folders (3mins to 1min 20ish) - this being only the first time I view the folder - and then the speed is just like any other network attached drive I have used.

Not perfect but a lot happier that I was earlier today.

Thanks to the 2 Tony’s for pointing me in the right direction!!!

10

Great to hear! This should be a stickie for Mac users.

11

Update…

I’ve been testing a few different scenarios to try and get the best read/write speeds in Finder. I’ve found that:

AFP - Is the best for file transfer.

SMB - Best for browsing folders. However, write speed isn’t far behind AFP so could be used for Read/Write.

NFS - Is faster that SMB during read e.g. Displays my music folder in 15 seconds as opposed to 75 seconds (SMB) - but it seems to hang after a short period browsing. Didn’t time the length of the hang or test it it persisted after the initial hang. Also has the limitation of connecting to the default Public folder as per WD docs.

I’ve also tried a few Finder alternative and FTP clients but they performed in much the same way.

Also found some information that removing .DS_Store files from the share and preventing them from being written to the share helped. Tried it - no noticeable improvement.

** NOTE  - the slow performance is only when using finder. Accessing music from iTunes is comparable to having the music local to my laptop.

I’m going to keep on researching the slow Finder performance and will update this post if I have any more information to share.

Maybe OS X Lion will improve things??!!!