Measuring performance on a device such as the My Cloud that communicates strictly over an Internet connection is a bit dicey. Because My Cloud operates over a network instead of a local storage interface, we aren’t able to run our normal spate of benchmarks.
However, we want to give you a sense of how My Cloud performs, so we conducted timed file transfer tests and also used versions of ATTO and CrystalDiskMark that can run on mapped network drives.
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| Timed File Transfers |
| Sending files over the network |
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For comparison purposes, we clocked several file transfers of different sizes from an external hard drive to our test PC, and then we repeated the process by moving those same files from the PC to the My Cloud and recorded the time each one took. Thus, we got a sense of how transfer times of local storage via a USB 3.0 interface compared to those of My Cloud from a PC.
As expected, transfers from an external drive to a PC happen at a blistering speed compared to those to My Cloud. Note that as the size of the file transfer increases, the time it takes for the PC-to-My Cloud transfers to finish compared to the local USB 3.0 connection increases by a larger delta. Still, 89 seconds for a large (3.33GB) chunk of files is nothing.
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| ATTO Disk Benchmark |
| More information here: http://bit.ly/btuV6w |
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ATTO is a "quick and dirty" type of disk benchmark that measures transfer speeds across a specific volume length. It measures transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs them out in an easily interpreted chart. We chose .5kb through 8192kb transfer sizes and a queue depth of 6 over a total max volume length of 256MB. ATTO's workloads are sequential in nature and measure bandwidth, rather than I/O response time, access latency, etc.
My Cloud posted some imbalanced read and write speeds here. With smaller file sizes it delivered slower read/write speeds between 1.9/1.3 MBps and 6.2/6.5 MBps, but once the device got cranking it reached as high as 49 MBps (writes) and 74 MBps (reads). Mostly, though, the test results hovered between 50-70 MBps for reads and 30-37 MBps for writes. For comparison, a decent external hard drive with a USB 3.0 interface would turn in read/write speeds closer to 100-120 MBps.
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| CrystalDiskMark Benchmarks |
| Synthetic File Transfer Tests |
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CrystalDiskMark is a synthetic benchmark that tests both sequential and random small and mid-sized file transfers. It provides a quick look at best and worst case scenarios with regard to drive performance, best case being larger sequential transfers and worse case being small, random transfers.
You won't get the same kind of read and write speeds out of the WD My Cloud, as you would with a locally attached drive, but its performance across the network was acceptable.
