MBL - Very slow transfer????

[PabloB]

Thanks again Myron,

My router is the standard AT&T Uverse router.  It is not giabit, which is why I installed the gigabit switch.  Unfortunately, changing the MTU to 1420 did not do the trick.  No change in performance.  A friend of mine set a Tivo unit up in his network and to make it work properly had to change some settings on his router despite the fact that he was using a gigabit switch.  That's why I'm wondering whether there's some magic in the router that is constipating the system.  Again, out of my league.

I'm thinking of returning this unit and trying a Seagate Black Armor 4T drive.  It's more expensive.  I wonder if this is a you get the performance you pay for situation.  But I just can't imagine anyone would find the performance I'm getting from the MBL for viewing photos acceptable.  Dang.

[Myron]

Try a simpler down to basics solution.  What if there is something wrong with an RJ-45 socket or one of the network cables?  All four pairs of wires on the Car5e or Cat6 cables need to be connected.  It is possible that there is a bad connection but the two pairs that are needed for a 100Mbit connection are working. Investigate the problem from that angle.

Many forget that it could be a simple connection fault and mess about with the settings.

If there is an open circuit on the network wiring then no amount of tweaking will speed things up.

Also remember that it could be the ISP issue if the speed issue if from a connection from the Internet into your home network.  Check that out too.

[PabloB]

I am coming to the conclusion that perhaps the CPU in the MBL is simply not fast enough to do what I'm asking it to do.  My iPhoto library is about 59 Gbs.  A pretty chunky file by any standard.  When I fire up iPhoto, it takes at least a minute to populate the thumbnails on iPhoto.  Even after waiting a long, long time for iPhoto to get populated by the NAS, navigation is unacceptably slow -- with that little colored pinwheel showing up constantly.  I'm thinking that all the back and forthing from computer to the NAS required for me to work with the many photos on in my library is simply overwhelming the drive.  The MBL has a CPU processor speed of 800 MHz.  The Synology Slim, at the other end of the spectrum for example, has a CPU with a speed of 1.6 GHz.  I'm thinking that may be my answer: more horsepower is needed under the hood.  Any thoughts from my fellow electronics grease monkeys?

[Rugger09]

I had experienced the same frustrating problem with the ethernet MBL.  I have a late 2011 iMac, Lion 10.7 with an airport extreme.  I wanted my MBL as a network drive and it was working very well (servicing another iMac, two iPads and an iPod Touch).  The only glitch was the extreme lag when using iPhoto.  My data files were fine, my iTunes were fine but the iPhoto displayed the same symptons that you observed (extremely slow).

In the digging I did on other forums revealed it is not an issue with WD drives exclusively, but to most drives that are not formatted to the mac formatting.  To test this, I used my LaCie drive formatted for mac, copied my iPhoto over and tried it.  The results were a lightning fast iPhoto - the way it was supposed to run.

I do not believe I can format the ethernet edition of the MBL HD.  I'm very disappointed that I cannot do what I want to do with the MBL.  Too much time has elapsed for a return.  Anyone else come to this conclusion?

[anotherpaul]

The problem is probably Apple wants everyone to do things the Apple way, without any deviation; kinda like one cannot change the 7 point system font size even since back to 2004 as I've read; lowering a monitor's resolution is NOT the good answer.  I've got the 2nd half 2012 mac mini that is just about useless for anything but a door stop.

The MBL does have sufficient horsepower at least under win7 wired.  Yesterday, I transferred about 4.7 gigs of audio consisting about 450 files in about 33 MBs; then did the same for 3 DVDs ripped (about 8.7 gig) in around a very surprising 57 MBs, probably due to the long small number of files.

The xfer was from the MBL to a switch to the router to my computer to the external usb3 hard drive.  The computer's cpu is a intel e6550 & built around 2005 or so; does have 8 gig memory now tho.

I do notice that sometimes I get "only" around 12 MBs for audio xfer (backup) when the number of files/bytes are small as in around 1-2 gig.  I do use ms's free richcopy which does just file copies & the default is using 3 threads to copy so that more than 3 files can be copied "at the same time"; not a fancy backup.

[Myron]

Erm....  Over a networ link it does not matter how the network storage drive is formatted.  The operating system of the client computer does not know the format of disc on the network storage device.  It just knows there is a resource there that it can access.

[Rugger09]

Yes, true statement from the operating system perspective.  iPhoto is proving to be a different animal.  The resident apple experts on other boards have all suggested that external drives servicing iPhoto will need to be formatted to mac format or it will perform sub-optimally.  My observations fall in line with their recommendations.  iTunes and the normal file transfer activities work fine over the network regardless of formatting. 

Cheers