WD my cloud 4th is Super Slow

Question

I am using a WD my cloud 4Tb and I have read other posts about users complaining about getting only 10Mb per second. My problem is that I am getting about 100kb/s to transfer a 125gb iPhoto library. Estimated time is 11 days to transfer this file. This is unacceptable.

On the back of the WD cloud I am getting a solid green light and from what I read this means that I am on a gigabyte network. I have mac book pro running Mac OS Mavericks.

I have tried 4 different cables and turned off my router firewall. I don't run anti-virus nor any firewall on the mac.

Other things I have checked: direct connection to both router and WD cloud device. Tried wireless but it is even slower.

Previously I was able to transfer a 55Gb iPhoto library in 14 hours which I felt was acceptable. I figured it would take approximately double the time to transfer the 125gb file but 11 days is ridiculous. Any other suggestions? Anything else I can check (how to check it) what is the bottle neck?

Answer 1

Connect your MyCloud device directly to your MacBook via Ethernet, with no router or other device in between. Under the Sharing System Preference Pane, enable Internet Sharing. In the "Share your connection from" pull-down, select Wi-Fi. In the box below 'To Computers using', check Ethernet. This will give your MyCloud a DHCP address to work with your Ethernet interface.

You should now be able to connect to your MyCloud in the usual way.

Begin a large file transfer as a test.

Open Terminal.app, in /Applications/Utilities/.

To see with what link speed your MyCloud has connected to your Macbook, do:

ifconfig en0 or perhaps ifconfig en2 if using Thunderbolt. This will give an interface description like:

[Nevins-Mac-mini:~] nevin% ifconfig en0
en0: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
    options=10b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_HWTAGGING,AV>
    ether 3c:07:54:5c:ab:ad 
    inet6 fe80::3e07:54ff:fe5c:abad%en0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x4 
    inet 192.168.2.122 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.2.255
    nd6 options=1<PERFORMNUD>
    media: autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex,flow-control>)
    status: active
[Nevins-Mac-mini:~] nevin% 

The status: active line means I'm looking at a connected interface, and the media: line above it means I've got a Gigabit connection that's full-duplex and supports flow-control.

With a large file-transfer in progress, look at traffic statistics with netstat:

[Nevins-Mac-mini:~] nevin% netstat -vI en0 8
                     input          (en0)           output
            packets  errs      bytes    packets  errs      bytes colls
03:36:07       3174     0     305928       6083     0    9171948     0
03:36:15       3085     0     297366       6145     0    9268910     0
03:36:23       3166     0     305142       6071     0    9155228     0

(The trailing 8 tells netstat to take 8 second samples, which means the 'bytes' column is actually a bits/sec average)

This shows I was sending data at 9 Mb/sec, which is about right for my network connection, with no link-level errors.

I don't know what the max throughput should be for your equipment, but even if you were only getting 10% of a Gigabit/sec, 125 Gigabytes = 1000 Gigabits. At just 0.1 Gb/s, that would be 10,000 seconds, or just under 3 hours.

Are your cables home-made, by chance?