WD ShareSpace 8TB -slowest ever transfer?

Jason Cole

Jason Cole

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Jason Cole
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Hey All,

As a professional photographer one of the things I am always working against is lack of disk space on my RAID drives. I seem to clear up 200GB then three days later its full again...

It happens for several reasons, like we shoot raw, we shoot two photographers for weddings, we have a very busy business....

Anyways I thought I would take the plunge and invest in a WD Sharespace 8TB RAID ($2200 AUD). A good size RAID with about 6TB of usable space (1 drive is used for the parity algorithm) but still 6TB is great.

It all seemed great.. until i tried copying files to it...

I am getting a maximum of 12.3mb/sec transfer to the raid.. when I have like 2TB of data i want to put onto it that equates to 2+ days of copying time... a VERY slow device indeed..

Has anyone else got one of these or know any tricks to speed it up... as with its current speed its almost unusable....

Our network is gigabit Ethernet.
 
Just a guess but the most common reasons for slow transfer speeds to a NAS are due to either the machine access the drive not having a network card that can handle gigabit speeds or the cable used is either too long, too old or can't handle the bandwidth. Might be worth trying it with a new, short cable to see if the transfer speeds change or using a different machine to access the NAS? Either way, hope you have fun with all that storage!
 
Yep, cables make a huge difference.
 
a 1 gigabit network equates to 125 megabytes per second with no attenuation and not including things such as TCP overhead and such like.

still, 12.3meg a second sounds slow - what are you connecting through switch wise ?
 
I get 26Mb/sec from the Mac pro to my proliant server running freeNAS via 1Gb Ethernet. That was just me timing a 2Gb file whilst attached to the pro via REMOTE from the macbook pro. Possibly jump up to 30Mb/sec normally.
 
also bear in mind that copying a load of small files will be a LOT slower than a few large files.

at work i can backup 2tb of large files at about 3.8gbps to our tape drive, but if the folder is full of a load of small files, it can drop the speed to 33mbps :(
 
Sounds about right for those boxes, they're rather sluggish as standard.
 
Sounds pretty dismal. I wouldn't be suprised with that speed on a cheap home device but on a 8TB box it's obviously intended for business use. First thing I'd do is make sure you are running everything through gigabit devices, and running the latest Firmware version on the NAS.
 
Are you using Cat6 cables? What switch/router are you using please?
 
As has already been said NAS Devices are known for being very slow.
 
software RAID ones are, yes...
get hardware RAID if you can :]
 
thnkas guys for your replies.

im running gigabit ethernet all round, and have the latest firmware on the devices too.

Maximum throughput i can get is 12-13mbits/ second.

I just tried downloading from the NAS... its even slower... so far an 11gb download has taken over an hour and its not even half way done yet.. lots of 10-15mb files... yawn....

My MAC pro has gigabit Ethernet, my switch is gigabit Ethernet, I am using cat 6 cable, the WD Sharespace 8TB has gigabit Ethernet.... and the latest firmware too.

Maybe its just how slow these devices are but it juts seems crazy considering the high speed interfaces and that its RAID5 so its writing to each disc separately...

I am pretty sure its hardware RAID too.... and i rang WD but have to call them back tomorrow before 10am as they are referring my case to second level tech support.
 
Are the indicator lights on the switch showing a gigabit link? My netgear shows amber for 100mbit and green for gigabit. I get up to 60mb/s transferring large files from machine to machine on my home network, but around 12mb/s to a 10/100 device. It seems like one or more of the devices are only detecting a 100mbit connection.
 
yeah, but that doesn't mean it hasn't auto negotiated at 100mbps...
 
Yep the switch has several devices connected to it. All the devices i have connected are glowing green 9100mbs) except two, but the two that are amber are a printer and a dvd drive.

From what I can see the entire path from the MAC to the RAID is gigabit ethernet.
 
My motherboard has 8 sata ports all configurable for RAID

I run a number of drives in RAID5 and the performance is great. Ditch NAS devices and get a decent mobo with RAID and setup network shares from your PC, Job done.
 
Is it faster if you connect via USB? This could possibly be a mac-ntfs problem? If its no faster via USB, are you able to format the NAS as HFS?
 
Jason Cole said:
Yep the switch has several devices connected to it. All the devices i have connected are glowing green 9100mbs) except two, but the two that are amber are a printer and a dvd drive.

From what I can see the entire path from the MAC to the RAID is gigabit ethernet.
Click to expand...

if green indicates 100mbps on your switch, then it's not 1gbps...
 
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