Very slow transfer rate to 5-6 year old WD MyBook Live hardwired

[Imola Ghost]

I store a bunch of music (140gb) on my NAS. Its about 5-6 years old and it appears to just be flat out slow with copying files and accessing files from it.

For instance: I was copying about 717mb of data to it yesterday and it said it was going to take about 15-17 minutes to finish. Although when it did finally finish it was more like 10 minutes. Does that sound right? And when I go to access my music through iTunes its always popping up spinning beach balls.

I know its older but and I'm no expert but if I got a new one or something better would it help? Also even though it is older I didn't think that anything has much changed on these things to make them any faster.

I have it directly connected to my Airport Extreme (the last model of the flat kind) router.

 

[satcomer]

Are you doing the transfer via Ethernet to wireless N? Is there other devices using the wireless? Did you use at least a CAT 6 Ethernet cable?

 

[Imola Ghost]

Are you doing the transfer via Ethernet to wireless N? Is there other devices using the wireless? Did you use at least a CAT 6 Ethernet cable?

My 2015 late iMac is hard wired directly to the AirPort Extreme.

My WD MyBookLive is hard wired directly to the AirPort Extreme.

Now I'm not sure if the cable is cat6 or cat5 but whatever Ethernet cable came with my WD MyBookLive.

None of this transferring should or is taking place using wireless as I have wireless turned off on my iMac.

 

[satcomer]

My 2015 late iMac is hard wired directly to the AirPort Extreme.

My WD MyBookLive is hard wired directly to the AirPort Extreme.

Now I'm not sure if the cable is cat6 or cat5 but whatever Ethernet cable came with my WD MyBookLive.

None of this transferring should or is taking place using wireless as I have wireless turned off on my iMac.

It should say in on the cable itself, printed!

 

[Imola Ghost]

It should say in on the cable itself, printed!

These were some cheap cables. However I did buy some cat6 and replace all of them just to make sure.

I have not noticed any changes in speed reading or writing.

 

[HDFan]

I store a bunch of music (140gb) on my NAS. Its about 5-6 years old and it appears to just be flat out slow with copying files and accessing files from it.

For instance: I was copying about 717mb of data to it yesterday and it said it was going to take about 15-17 minutes to finish. Although when it did finally finish it was more like 10 minutes. Does that sound right? And when I go to access my music through iTunes its always popping up spinning beach balls.

I know its older but and I'm no expert but if I got a new one or something better would it help? Also even though it is older I didn't think that anything has much changed on these things to make them any faster.

I have it directly connected to my Airport Extreme (the last model of the flat kind) router.

Have you done a transfer like this before? I.E., has transfer behavior changed?

You say it is a NAS. Is it connected via an ethernet port on the NAS to an ethernet port on the airport, or is it connected via the disk USB port?

If it is connected via ethernet do you have any other ports on your network that you could connect it to, i.e. a switch, to run a test to see if anything is different?

 

[mmomega]

I've had one of those older WD NAS drives and I would get max 5-7Megabytes transfer.
The cables had nothing to do with it as it was just a terrible drive.
I had tried direct connecting, connecting over an Airport Base Station, connecting through a gigabit switch, nothing helped the speeds.

I believe it was the MyBook World Edition.

At the time I just went back to USB drives and finally I've gone back to a NAS but an entirely new machine, a Synology 5 bay, DS1515+ about 2 years ago.