My Book Live 2TB very very slow normally only a few k/sec, OSX Mountain Lion, any thoughts?

[Andy_WDNAS]

Thanks for the support here!

I’ve connected the My Book Live 2TB to a Cisco Linksys Wifi router WRT120N, which is also wired to my iMac running OSX 10.8.2 Mountain Lion. There’s no gigabit ethernet in the router or iMac so it’s all connected by 10/100. The network options on the iMac are set to 100BaseTX, full duplex and the maximum I can select of 1500 MTU. Installation was smooth, but transfer speeds are terrible, usually no more than 1-2 MB/sec and normally I get around 5-15k/second. I can’t use the drive because of the poor speed.

Another friend of mine has the same drive and connected to gigabit ethernet on a newer iMac with a gigabit router. He gets speeds roughly 25 MB/sec. Though usable, I still think that sounds a bit slow compared to results some of you are posting through benchmarks. 

Any ideas?

[Trop1x]

Hi Andy_WDNAS,

I too just got a My Book Live 2TB today, 1st impression was not good; transfer speeds appeared appauling and thought I’d wasted my money.  

My initial setup was a 2011 iMac i5 2.7ghz with 12gb RAM running Mountain Lion, connected via Ethernet running at gigabit, I setup the iMac and MBL with a static IP addresses and simply connected a CAT5E cable between the iMac and MBL this took 2 hours to transfer 20gb this worked out approx 2.7MBs !

I was getting it ready to return it following a full factory reset, and decided to give it another go and do some real timed tests.

This time around the results surprised me, I changed my setup so that both the iMac and MBL were connected via a 1gb switch which was interconnected to my router via some HomePlugs (Ethernet over Mains Power), both the iMac and MBL were set to DHCP and could route traffic to the internet (MBL expects to resolve DNS and have Internet Access).

I tested AFP, CIFS and SMB and got the following results

AFP Protocol, 12.47gb test file @ 1000baseT
40.6MBs upload to NAS
97.4MBs download from NAS

CIFS and SMB Protocol, Results were nearly identical, 12.47gb test file @ 1000baseT
31.6MBs upload to NAS
57.6MBs download from NAS

The result was I could upload over 20gb in less than 10 mins!, this was a huge surprise compared to earlier in the day.

For your benefit I re-ran my tests at 100baseT

AFP Protocol, 12.47gb test file @ 100baseT
11.6MBs upload to NAS
11.6MBs download from NAS

CIFS and SMB Protocol, Results were nearly identical, 12.47gb test file @ 100baseT

9.1MBs upload to NAS

10.4MBs download from NAS

Can’t really say why the I got the improvement I did, I would have expected a direct hard wired 1000baseT connection to out perform the cheap gigabit switch I had at my disposal; not sure if it related to the lack of DNS and Internet routing in the 1st setup; but for now I think I’m happy with it.

I’d recommend you try a different an alternative router if you’ve got one, or perhaps a switch daisy chained off your router like mine. 

NB:  Only other thing of note which I discovered is that there is no way within the MBL GUI to configure Jumbo Frames, apparently this has to be done via SSH.

Hope you get it sorted.

Phil

PS:  These results were based on copying a single 12.47gb file.

[Andy_WDNAS]

I’ve done a bit more testing and I found the problem specifically occurs when trying to open files that are located on the My Book Live. I have a directory of over 1000 small images and movies backed up on the NAS and when I try to open say 10 images in preview, it crashes preview. In activity monitor the transfer rate usually hovers below 10k/second. When I try to copy a group of images to my desktop from the NAS it all transfers quickly around 5-6MB/second. Opening the images from my desktop doesn’t give preview any issues, only trying to open them on the NAS. Can you try to replicate my example? Thanks for your help in troubleshooting. A gigabit switch daisy chained to the router sounds like it may be my best option.   

[Andy_WDNAS]

It’s been another month and this drive is extremely slow hovering at 10k/second for backups and picture archiving. To create a 97GB Time Machine backup would take 6 days! Opening 10 pictures in a row crashes preview. 

I’ve seen other people reporting slow speeds of 10-15k/second with their WD MBL drives. Is there any solution? Thanks for the help in advance. 

[Andy_WDNAS]

An 84GB Time Machine Backup is taking 12 days with an average speed around 3-9k/second. I really appreciate any help with the speed issues. Thanks in advance again. 

[SonnyB9]

I was having the same issue, it would slow to just a couple of bytes per second. The first backup I did when the MBL was new only 2 months ago had reasonable perfromance. It took about 4 hours on the first backup.

I finally got mad at it and reset the MBL to factory defaults. I disabled Twonky and iTunes services, set an admin password and static IP. I left all the other settings alone. I also put both the MBL and my MacBook on a ethernet switch together. After that I got good performance, it was averaging about 20 MB/sec. Previously it was taking 32 hours to backup the same data. Before going to these lengths I tried deleting the sparse bundle and starting over. It didn’t help.

So the question is if there’s less drastic way to make the [Deleted] thing work right? [Deleted]

[Andy_WDNAS]

Are there any ideas? Can someone else try to see if opening multiple images or documents on the NAS at the same time  crashes preview? Is it slow for other mac users? It seems the only solution is a hardware one to buy a gigabit ethernet switch, but I can tell you that a friend has done that and the performance is still very slow for basic image and document opening. What’s going on WD?

[Carolvm]

entirely dissapointed, on windows it works extraordinary good, on mac OSX this is just useless.    I just manage to backup about 350Gb in 3 days, now finder restart when I try to open the folder.   The drive is connected to the same 1gbps switch where computer is connected, accesing via FTP is extremely fast, what can we do?

WD My Book Live 3Tb

MAC OSX 10.7.5