Western Digital My Cloud EX2 2-bay NAS Review
by Ganesh T S on March 4, 2014 11:00 AM EST- Posted in
- NAS
- Western Digital
- RAID
Single Client Performance - CIFS and NFS on Linux
A CentOS 6.2 virtual machine was used to evaluate NFS and CIFS performance of the NAS when accessed from a Linux client. In order to standardize the testing across multiple NAS units, the following parameters were used to mount the NFS and Samba shares:
mount -t nfs NAS_IP:/PATH_TO_NFS_SHARE /PATH_TO_LOCAL_MOUNT_FOLDER
mount -t cifs //NAS_IP/PATH_TO_SMB_SHARE /PATH_TO_LOCAL_MOUNT_FOLDER
Note that these areslightly different from what we used to run in our previous NAS reviews. We have also shifted from IOMeter to IOZone for evaluating performance under Linux. The following IOZone command was used to benchmark the shares:
iozone -aczR -g 2097152 -U /PATH_TO_LOCAL_CIFS_MOUNT -f /PATH_TO_LOCAL_CIFS_MOUNT/testfile -b <NAS_NAME>_CIFS_EXCEL_BIN.xls > <NAS_NAME>_CIFS_CSV.csv
IOZone provides benchmark numbers for a multitude of access scenarios with varying file sizes and record lengths. Some of these are very susceptible to caching effects on the client side. This is evident in some of the graphs in the gallery below.
Readers interested in the hard numbers can refer to the CSV program output here. These numbers will gain relevance as we benchmark more NAS units with similar configuration.
The NFS share was also benchmarked in a similar manner with the following command:
iozone -aczR -g 2097152 -U /nfs_test_mount/ -f /nfs_test_mount/testfile -b <NAS_NAME>_NFS_EXCEL_BIN.xls > <NAS_NAME>_NFS_CSV.csv
Some scenarios exhibit client caching effects, and these are evident in the gallery below.
The iozone CSV output can be found here for those interested in the exact numbers.
A summary of the bandwidth numbers for various tests averaged across all file and record sizes is provided in the table below. As noted previously, some of these numbers are skewed by caching effects. A reference to the actual CSV outputs linked above make the entries affected by this effect obvious.
| WD My Cloud EX2 - Linux Client Performance (MBps) | ||
| IOZone Test | CIFS | NFS |
| Init Write | 46 | 21 |
| Re-Write | 50 | 24 |
| Read | 23 | 92 |
| Re-Read | 23 | 94 |
| Random Read | 12 | 34 |
| Random Write | 30 | 18 |
| Backward Read | 13 | 28 |
| Record Re-Write | 30 | 243 |
| Stride Read | 21 | 63 |
| File Write | 49 | 22 |
| File Re-Write | 50 | 23 |
| File Read | 17 | 64 |
| File Re-Read | 17 | 67 |
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
20 Comments
View All Comments
hlmcompany - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link
The article states: "The Western Digital My Cloud EX2 is bundled with a 36 W(12V @ 3A) adapter. A power cord (customized to the country of sale) and a network cable are included in the package." The EX2 units do not include a power cord. The 36 watt power adapter is a fixed-plug wallwart-style unit. The comment about a power cord seems to be left-over from the EX4 review.ganeshts - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link
Thanks for the note. I have fixed the relevant text.redmist77 - Wednesday, March 5, 2014 - link
I refuse to buy any product with cloud in the name.romrunning - Wednesday, March 5, 2014 - link
Well, that just kills my idea for "Cloud-soft" (tm pending) toilet paper!futbol4me - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
One very useful non-geeky benchmark would be time machine backup performance. I have a mybook live and while it may read and write files with decent performance via afs or smb, time machine backups are almost unuseably slow.teich50 - Saturday, March 8, 2014 - link
Has anyone figured out how to perform an encrypted Time Machine backup to My Cloud? I think, by default, the Time Machine back up writes to the Guest account with no encryption, which is scary.Atty - Sunday, March 9, 2014 - link
What is your recommendation on hard drive choice? For this to be used to share and store mainly media files and stream them to various devices. Would it be worth the investment to get the re4 drives or are the red drives suitable?Cybernut1 - Friday, March 21, 2014 - link
Red drives are recommended.For a home or small office setup Re drives are overkill. Re drivesare geared towards data centers. WD recommends Red for most common uses for this product though they will support select few other drives. Here's the full list of supported drives - http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=11...Cybernut1 - Friday, March 21, 2014 - link
The couple big issues for me with this having used it for a week are:1) Currently the ftp functionality is broken (if you are trying to ftp from outside your local network - which is almost 100% of the time). Broken because you cannot save your external IP for passive ftp to work and that is critical. It keeps resetting the external IP value to 0.0.0.0. I have a trouble ticket open with their tech support but ETA for fix is unknown at this time.
2) There does not seem to be any way for sftp - which is really a reason for many to get this. Even if you can get ftp to work (by going into the shell and making unsanctioned edit to the ftp configuration file), you cannot really do much about sftp. I am used to creating sftp via shell access for work - but here when you try to create an user in the embedded lightweight linux, that user cannot login to the shell no matter what privs you give that user. And without a remote way to ssh into the box, you can't do scp or sftp. So their marketing claim about "Secure FTP support" on this page -> http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=11... (click on Advanced Serving tab) is rubbish.
jmm317 - Thursday, June 5, 2014 - link
I found WD My Clound EX2 and was happy because I bought this was a great idea and a perfect solution. I found the product has several problems that makes this product useless. The problem is the following. The unit CPU work 24/7 at 100% because it has issues with a process name "Convert" that tries to create thumbs to media files. The problem I´m experimenting it not an isolated case, you can find in WD Community lots of people having the same problem. WD is aware of the problem for a while and has not find a solution (firmware update) or doesn´t care.This problem:
- Not been able to access the unit.
- When you have access the unit crashes.
- Difficulty to access files.
- Continually crashes and need to be restart.
WD should stop selling My Clound EX2 and start a refund process.
Link:
http://community.wd.com/t5/Network-Product-Ideas/T...