Western Digital MyBook 2TB NAS
This is a great looking product, extremely easy to use, holds a massive amount of files, and its one of the cheapest Network Attached Storage (NAS) products you can buy.
Unfortunately, its performance is TERRIBLE. The average new SATA hard drive in your desktop PC can write files at around 60 MB/s (60 megabytes a second), or a 5GB file in about 2 minutes. The MyBook World Edition can only write files at around 5 MB/s so that same 5GB file would take 17 minutes. I don’t understand why this product would be more than 10 times slower than a regular hard drive. Heck the Buffalo 1TB external USB hard drive I reviewed last month writes files at 25 MB/s – five times faster than the MyBook.
The MyBook has a Gigabit Ethernet port, which has a max rate of 125 MB/s, it also has TWO internal hard drives, that we know should be able to do 60 MB/s (assuming they are SATA drives, which they probably are). So WHY is this drive so dang slow?
I checked to see if I could reformat the hard drive to make it RAID 0 striped, hoping to improve the performance. Unfortunately the MyBook only offers Raid 1 (redundant data) or drive spanning. So ultimately, because of the bad performance this product is unacceptable. I’m planning on continuing my investigations into NAS products to see if I can find something that actually comes close to maxing out Gigabit Ethernet. I know nothing on the box said “Its really fast!” but I can’t help but feel a little misled.
#1 by Ged - August 2nd, 2009 at 21:56
Have you found anything yet you would recommend as I was jst about to buy the WD – so am pleased I found your post. Also heard of another who was very disappointed with speed.
Love some advice on what you think is more suitable.
#2 by admin - August 7th, 2009 at 06:35
Hi Ged,
for the time being I have been using the Buffalo DriveStation USB 2.0 1TB external. Its cheap and much faster than the current WD solutions. Its unfortunate, but for the time being its actually cheaper re-purpose an old desktop machine, install a 1GB Ethernet adapter, a 1TB SATA2 HDD and stick it on your network as a file server. If your old desktop has built in RAID, put 2 or more hard drives and create a mirror or better. If your old machine doesn’t have hardware RAID, install server 2003 or Windows 7, and use Dynamic Disks to create a software RAID, its slower, but your 1GB Ethernet would be capping your SATA 2 HDD speed anyways.