I’m getting 15-20MB/s to an USB3 external drive which I know can do better when connected to another computer. I’m ssh’d into the EX2 and running rsync to check the speed. Someone said that NTFS filesystem on the USB drive might be the problem but I’m getting the same speeds to a HFS+ external as well.
Hello, welcome to the WD Community. Are you transferring information from the computer to the USB attached to the drive or moving information via SSH? Have you tried using the Web File Viewer in the dashboard?
I’m transferring from the raid1 array in the WD EX2 to a USB 3.0 2TB external drive also attached to the WD EX2 via the USB 3.0 ports on the back. I’m logging the transfer rate via rsync which I’m initiating from an SSH session on the WD EX2. The performance of this transfer will directly impact the speed at which the WD can backup its own contents to a direclty connected expansion drive, hence my interest in getting this to go faster. The bottleneck can’t be the raid1 array in the EX2, or the USB 3.0 interface or the external drive so it must be something else. Perhaps software related.
Hey, have you tried starting the transfer from the Dashboard? I have used the EX 2 own backup feature to backup a dying portable drive and it was USB 3.0 Speed.
I can try but I don’t see how it can be any faster than cp or rsync from an ssh session. The Dashboard backend is probably calling either of those.
I think I know what it is. I tested using the web dashboard via a backup job. Transferred a single 7.5G file to maximize sequential rate over many little files with more start-stop IO overhead. Anyway I got around 22MB/s which is ever so slightly more than what I was getting with rsync in a ssh session. I’m going to chalk that up to margin of error. I also tested both NTFS and EXT4 for the external and it didn’t make a difference.
However, what I did notice is that during the transfer for both rsync and the dashboard the CPU load went to 100% so I’m really leaning towards that the CPU is the bottleneck. Not much I can do about that. Kind of a waste of USB 3.0 if the CPU can’t keep up. I’m pretty sure all of the EX2 reviews online don’t really touch on this limitation.
I might get a new NAS to see what a faster CPU would get me.
