So I'm using Handbrake to shrink down the file size of a bunch of movies so I can put them onto my Samsung Galaxy S5 smart phone.

Making pretty good progress... I'm getting movies that are about 4.5 GB down to under 1 GB.

Then, I have to archive them as well as copy them to my media server (to download to my phone over wifi).  It's a bit labor intensive, and I could probably find a easier way.

But hey!  We're geeks and we love this stuff

At one point, I noticed the dramatic differences in transfer speeds between devices.  So much so, I added an additional device to get some numbers on.

Here is the raw data:

File size and type:
813 MB .mp4

Source file was located on my Windows 7 Desktop, which is stored on my 240 GB Intel 530 SSD


Destination / Protocol / Elapsed time (in Seconds)


Western Digital MyCloud NAS / Ethernet (CPU>Switch>NAS) / 74 seconds

Western Digital My Passport 500 GB / USB 2.0 (front panel USB port>device) / 40.87 seconds

Western Digital My Passport 1 TB / USB 3.0 (PCI USB 3.0 card>device) / 11.97 seconds

Western Digital Blue 1 TB HDD / SATA (source and destination plugged into mobo SATA port) / 9.41 seconds


My main take away was that recently adding the  USB 3.0 card for the few $$ it cost was a good choice.

I'm kind of surprised ethernet was that much slower. What software protocol did you use for the ethernet transfer?

Pretty neat.

I just copied and pasted the file in Windows Explorer.

I did not use the WD MyCloud GUI... Maybe I should just to see if there is a difference?

My experience with the WD MyCloud is that even over gigabit Ethernet from a SATA III WD Black device it's a slow copy, but probably still faster than over 10/100. I wonder how much of that is my AV software?

I'm wondering if the MyCloud is just a place for WD to dump their Green drives that didn't sell. Those things were real slow.

I've always found that you can get 40-60% faster transfers from transferring from a command line transfer.

Actual methods I've used, rsync is far faster, especially using the z option, than scp. Rsync is my preferred method for copying multiple files to a hard disk. I managed to copy 356 GB (166 movies) over USB 2.0 in a little over an hour with rsync. That was having a drive plugged directly into the server which had all the movies, and then using an ssh session to evoke and monitor the transfer.

I don't put movies on my devices…I just use Plex. MakeMKV to rip off the disk, Handbrake to convert the files (usually run about 720p resolution for around a 2GB file).

If you want some annoyance, the SD slot on my MBA can read at some rate, same card plugged into my D90 over USB reads at about twice that rate. Plug a card reader into USB... original rate. WTF Apple

I'm willing to bet that the MyCloud drive was the limiting factor.

Needs mor 802.11ac!

The gui kills transfer speeds. The only time I really dick around with SD cards is when using dd…

 

You would see better results by using faster source/destination disks as you're not really saturating the pipe.