WD My Book Live 4TB Slow Network Speeds.

[a llama vortex]

Hello all,

 

Just a quick one. I've had this drive for a few years now and the speed wasn't really ever an issue until now. The network read/write speeds to the device are somewhere between 20-30 MB/s according to Crystal Disk Mark and dragging/dropping via windows gives a similar speed. The issue is that I've had FTTP installed so my internet download speed is 310Mbit, I'd really prefer not to have to download to another drive and then copy to the NAS if I can avoid it.

Everything on the LAN part of the setup is 1Gbit. I've also tried various cat 5e/6 cables all with the same result.

 

I think it's a fairly popular drive so hoping some people on here have had some experience with this.

Edit: Everything is wired so no Wifi involved as I'm sure that'll come up as a suggestion.

[WereCatf]

21 minutes ago, a llama vortex said:

Everything is wired so no Wifi involved as I'm sure that'll come up as a suggestion.

Um, you didn't ask any question.

[ManyCoresGuy]

49 minutes ago, a llama vortex said:

Hello all,

 

Just a quick one. I've had this drive for a few years now and the speed wasn't really ever an issue until now. The network read/write speeds to the device are somewhere between 20-30 MB/s according to Crystal Disk Mark and dragging/dropping via windows gives a similar speed. The issue is that I've had FTTP installed so my internet download speed is 310Mbit, I'd really prefer not to have to download to another drive and then copy to the NAS if I can avoid it.

Everything on the LAN part of the setup is 1Gbit. I've also tried various cat 5e/6 cables all with the same result.

 

I think it's a fairly popular drive so hoping some people on here have had some experience with this.

Edit: Everything is wired so no Wifi involved as I'm sure that'll come up as a suggestion.

So what is your question?

[a llama vortex]

Well 20-30Mb/s isn't 1Gbit speeds. It's more like 160-250Mbit even though the device and everything else on the network is connected at 1Gbit via ethernet cables.

 

It's much slower than it should be and now it's more of an issue because my internet speed is faster than the capabilities of the network transfer speed to the NAS for some reason.

 

Edit: If I SSH to the device and check the disk speeds the results are:

 

Hades:~# sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   618 MB in  2.00 seconds = 308.51 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 192 MB in  3.03 seconds =  63.39 MB/sec
Hades:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/output.img bs=8k count=256k && rm /tmp/output.img
dd: writing `/tmp/output.img': No space left on device
12209+0 records in
12208+0 records out
100007936 bytes (100 MB) copied, 0.379004 s, 264 MB/s
Hades:~#

 

Hades:~# ethtool eth0
Settings for eth0:
        Supported ports: [ MII ]
        Supported link modes:   10baseT/Full
                                100baseT/Full
                                1000baseT/Full
        Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
        Advertised link modes:  10baseT/Full
                                100baseT/Full
                                1000baseT/Full
        Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
        Speed: 1000Mb/s
        Duplex: Full
        Port: MII
        PHYAD: 1
        Transceiver: external
        Auto-negotiation: on
        Link detected: yes
 

[WereCatf]

1 hour ago, a llama vortex said:

Well 20-30Mb/s isn't 1Gbit speeds. It's more like 160-250Mbit even though the device and everything else on the network is connected at 1Gbit via ethernet cables.

If you're copying a large file to the device at the same time that you're downloading some big file from the Internet, does one or the other slow down?

[a llama vortex]

Hi, thanks for the reply. No, it's not impacted by saturating the WAN. It actually seems to be quite a common problem but there doesn't seem to be an obvious fix.

[WereCatf]

6 minutes ago, a llama vortex said:

Hi, thanks for the reply. No, it's not impacted by saturating the WAN. It actually seems to be quite a common problem but there doesn't seem to be an obvious fix.

If you just connect your PC directly to the WD-device without any switch/router/whatever between them, do you then get better performance?

[a llama vortex]

Sadly it's the same. I've just been through the settings and I can get slightly better performance from connecting to the device via FTP but that still doesn't fix the transfer to issue. I'm going to see if I can install a torrent client directly to the NAS as it runs Linux and see if the download speed is any better, therefore eliminating Windows altogether.