I am thinking to buy WD My Cloud. I ahve one question at the moment. Currently I backup my data to a USB 3 external hard drive and data transfer speed is OK. As compared to this, how will be the transfer speed with Wstern Digital My Cloud( if I transfer data to this drive via network). Will it be much slower? Thanks
First it depends on how the WD My Cloud is connected to the network. Ideally that should be via a Gigabit or higher Ethernet cable to the router. Then it depends on how the clients are connect to the WD. Wireless AC (or at least N), or Gigabit Ethernet through the router would be ideal. If you connect directly to the WD My Cloud without hooking it up to the network, the same recommendations apply I believe.
Ok, with WD My Cloud connected to the network via a Gigabit ethernet cable to the router and clients connected to the WD via Wireless AC- what speed I should expect. Will it be as fast as a USB 3 ext drive transfer? Thanks
The speed limit of Wireless AC is 1.3 Gbit/s, while the Gigabit Ethernet is 1 Gbit/s obviously (although you can upgrade to 10 Gigabyte Ethernet). The speed limit of USB 3.0 is 5 Gbit/s, which means it should be theoretically faster. But you never really see those speeds, especially since your bottlenecked by the hard drive(s) inside WD My Cloud. Therefore as long as there isn't too much network traffic, I think the actual speed would be virtually identical at 100+ MByte/s (note 1 MByte = 8 Mbit, so that's actually close to the network limit). If the WD My Cloud is using SSD or RAID 0, then the USB 3.0 would be faster I believe.
In my experience you will get much slower average transfer speed to Wireless AC connected cloud HDD, then you will get if you backup directly to a USB 3.0 external HDD. The wireless AC transfer speed will increase and decrease depending on the load on the network. Also, for a mixed wireless AC network that is back compatible with Wireless N and G, the average transfer speeds will be far less then a network that runs on Wireless AC only. However, the convenience of backing to a wireless HDD should outweigh the slower transfer speed of the wireless backup. Time should actually not be consideration here as you can let the backup happen in the background, so it should not matter how long the backup actually takes. So the short answer to your question is that in real world, a direct transfer to an external USB 3.0 drive should be a lot faster then to a wireless AC cloud HDD.
Interesting, never knew that. Also I kind of doubt the OP has Wireless AC (on both client and network), simply due to how rare it is currently. I guess you're right not to expect ideal network connections without background noise when everyone is using the Internet these days. But how about backing up overnight when everyone is asleep? Would there be as much difference considering the bottleneck of the HDD?
This has always been true, even for N and G standards as well. I have personal experience in this, where the same routers were used to create two networks. One network was exclusively wireless N, while the other was back compatible with wireless G. The transfer speeds on the wireless N exclusive network was a lot higher than the transfer speeds on the mixed network. The drawback obviously was that wireless G devices could not connect to the exclusive wireless N network. To some extent the transfer speeds are also affected by the selected frequency bands in use. If the network is configured exclusively for the 5 GHz band, the throughput is higher then for a mixed 5 and 2.4 GHz network. However, the drawback is that the 5 GHz freq signal is not able to pass through walls as well as the 2.4 GHz freq signal, so your network's range becomes limited. I have also noticed the transfer speeds are a lot higher for a network that is exclusively run on the 40 MHz per channel bandwidth, then the one run on a mixed 20/40 MHz channel. But then either the wireless G or the 2.4 GHz frequency (I have to confirm that) is not compatible with 40 MHz channel, so these devices will not connect on a exclusive 40 MHz per channel network. If there is only one client backing to the cloud HDD, then it might be possible to get the max transfer speed from the wireless AC connection, but still you cannot guarantee that no device will be accessing the network nowadays with internet connected TV's, cell phones, tablets, TV cable boxes etc. If speed is the main concern then a direct usb 3.0 connection will still be a lot faster then a wireless AC connection.
