WD MyBook World Edition II Speed problems

Hello all,

I have just purchased a WD MyBook World Edition II (gotta shorten the title..) and have it hooked up through my 100mbps LAN. My network setup is my Laptop which goes through Wi-Fi on my Netgear RangeMax Router.

The MyBook has a 10/10/1000 ethernet port on the back, and I have even tried plugging in directly to my laptop to the router to transfer files. It seems that anything I do with this unit, even browsing through a shared drive on my laptop has a lag time of click, wait, view the files/folders, click, wait etc... Transfering files/writing/copying etc is also like using a old 10based T connection to transfer files, slow...

I have now worked myself into a corner as this was to be a simple purchase for my small business to archive work etc and has turned into a small side project researching and reading etc, time I don't have right now. I looked at the HP Media Vault and the Netgear SC101, but opted for the WD based on the price, 3 year warranty, and small footprint. HP Mediavault required me to purchase an additional drive on top of the 500.00 pricepoint with one drive, and the SC101 has too many hardware incompatibilities I have read and thus, my purchase of the WD.

One other point to note, that accessing the control panel on this unit, is even slow, click, wait, click wait etc. Contacting WD has yielded a no response, message boards over at WD have also yielded little to no responses so I am looking for some help if anyone has run into this problem, has any suggestions or ideas? To me 100mbps should be pretty fast to transfer/copy/write etc, do I have to upgrade my network to 1000gigabit ethernet???

Thanks everyone for any help/suggestions you can throw at me!

Actually I took a 196mb movie and transfered it via wireless to the NAS, it took 1:32 to transfer. I tried my ethernet port and went wired to the network and it took 48sec. I did not try to "pull" anything off of it yet.

Unfortunately the laptop is all I use, but I'll give it a shot with my desktop which is current but not used.

196 MB (206,467,076 bytes) is what the ol' properties has yielded through Win XP. The laptop is a Gateway MX6421, 1gb ram, and the hdd is 80mb running at 4200rpm. I guess im just spited and bitter that the drive's supplied archive software stinks and otherwise does not work which after the 420.00 investment, I have to buy different archival software. Guess I couldn't beat a 2hdd Raid enabled NAS for that price.

So I think the transfer rate is on par with the wi-fi? Probably best that I hook it up to the wired ethernet for transfers

10MB/sec = 80Mbps, or pretty close to the max you could expect from a 100Mpbs ethernet.

In the real world, the throughput you can expect from a NAS is governed by more than just the ethernet throughput. A NAS that advertises 1000Mbps (gigabit) support does not mean it actually provides throughput in and out of the device any faster than it would through a 100Mbps network.

Here are some things to consider:
ATA 133 (PATA) goes up to 133MB/sec (~1000Mbps)
SATA 1.5 goes up to 150MB/sec (~1200Mbps)
SATA 3.0 goes up to 300MB/sec (~2400Mbps)

However, the Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 SATA 3.0 hard drive has a sustained throughput of only 32.9 - 67.8 MB/sec (depending on location of the data on the platters), or ~ 260 - 540 Mbps. So, even with a perfectly efficient NAS electronics, using one of the highest performing comsumer drives on the market will not get you but 1/3 of the way to gigabit throughput on and off the drive for large files.

Check out SmallNetBuilder's NAS pages, and especially their NAS test charts.

Yeah, you have to pay attention to the units of measure. Networks (wired ethernet, wireless, USB, firewire, etc) are typically specified in xbps, where x=K, M, or G, and b=bits. File sizes and hard drive data transfer specifications are typically specified in xB, where B=bytes. There are 8 bits in a byte.

I didn't say that. Anything upwards of 60Mpbs file transfer rate across a 100Mbps network is in the expected range. A pretty much idle network can get upwards of 80-90Mbps, but not much higher. Ethernet does have some overhead.

For wireless, you can use a rule-of-thumb that you take the claimed bit rate (54Mbps for 802.11g) and divide it by 3. If you can reach that 1/3 threshhold, you're in the acceptable range. A really fussy network designer might get wireless to approach 1/2 for "perfect" wireless network. Wireless has much more overhead than wired, plus the other noise issues wireless has to deal with.

For gigabit, you can expect general network throughput to be able to approach the same percentage as for your 100Mpbs wired - that is, upwards of 800Mbps should be achievable with true gigabit equipment. To reach that, you need to pay attention to the equipment you buy (routers, switches, NICs, NASs, etc.) to make sure it actually performs at gigabit speeds, and is not just compatible with a gigabit interface. There are a lot of marketing games going on here. If you expect to reach this throughput, you also need to understand and pay attention to such concepts as "jumbo frames" and ensure that is supported by your equipment where necessary.

The NAS chart I provided the link to includes several NAS devices that exceed 100Mbps in throughout, but to get the truly high-zoot performance on gigabit networks, many people custom build their NAS.

The internal processor is the problem with this waste of money, i mean NAS.

What's that? Processor speed? Yes. The processor in this beastly piece of crap is capable of an astonishing 5 MB/s. 5 Megabytes per second. 40 Megabits per second. That's a far cry from 1000 Megabits per second.

At least they included the fast ethernet interface so the entire network doesn't get dragged down. Don't believe me? Read this:

Begin---
Thank you for contacting Western Digital Customer Service and Support.

Our internal testing and what we've seen from other customers show that the MyBook World's will transfer speed is 24-40Mbps (3-5 MBps) on a local network. The drive does not move data quicker because that is the maximum throughput that the enclosure's CPU can handle.

Sincerely,
Jeremy H.
Western Digital Service and Support
---End

What a waste of 270 dollars.

overclocking WD mybook world editionII is entirely feasible，the ARM processor core before @100MHz（200Mhz） read 5~6MB/s，writing 4~5MB。Overclocking to 133MHz（266Mhz），copy file （by copy software Fastcopy 1.90 rev R4），speedup to read 6~7MB/s，Writing 5~6MB/s 。
very fun，the ARM core BUS running about 100MHz（like 200Mhz），overclocking BUS at 133MHz，ARM core running @266MHz。
In China, there's enthusiast-made systems can be deployed to the WD mybookWorldEditionII, just need to click one button to switch 100/133Mhz frequency, I used about 100 days, all good.

Transmission performance of the above based on a 100Mbps network and TPlink WR340G 54Mbps wifi router. With PC-NAS moving a 1GB file transfer test.