WD Live is not fit for purpose

TonyPh12345 wrote:

Look.  

 

People who think that, if it doesn’t work for THEM, it doesn’t work for ANYONE, are loons.  

 

The CURRENT firmware works for 99% of people, or more, including myself.

  

Tony, Tony, Tony, you have just made my day with that post. I’ve not stopped chuckling for the past few minutes. I don’t know whether it’s your blatantly ficticious yet implausibly exact 99% statistic or the massive irony of you posting this to a forum littered with threads about how the current firmware doesn’t work that is tickling me the most. The icing on the cake is seeing threads like “cannot access http://myb​ooklive” and “Can not longer access mybooklive​/UI/#” with hundreds and thousands of reads respectively, and posts like “The RAMLOG only has 20Mb allocated to it. Once that fills it disables itself  … Finally the system partition gets full-up and other services will begin to malfunction” by Myron on the very same page as this thread referring to the current firmware.

I don’t know if you were aware of how ironic your post was (it was dictionary definition quality), but I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt on this one. I’m certainly going to be laughing at your post all evening - you’ve really cheered me up with that one!

By the way, the response from WD is not that I have a faulty drive and that it should be returned, so they are not treating this as a one off problem (but then you’d have to be a blind loon to think that having read the posts in this forum, right Tony?). Apparently having the NAS box lock up twice in three weeks seems par for the course and just requires another factory reset.

Now back to chuckling …

CaphWD - I respect the issues that you are having and am pushing our software teams to find root cause (which to this date has been difficult to A) get units in house that replicate the issue then B) diagnose how they got in that state.

This is not a sky is falling scenario though. I monitor the number of downloads of the software (in the high tens of thousands) vs. the incoming calls to our support center, and it is still a very small percentage. However; that does not excuse us from anyone bricking their units. We have numerous fail-safe options in place that are supposed to prevent this, but it looks like there are certain situations that are boundary and causing these failures. As soon as we have the issue resolved, we will post an upgrade. Understood that you are frustrated - as am I. However; we are committed to getting this resolved.

Tony

1 Like

CaphWD wrote:    … with hundreds and thousands of reads respectively

Do you REALLY think you can measure an issue by the number of PEOPLE READING about it?

*I* read that thread.   Does that mean *I* have the issue?   According to you, it does…

Yeah, 99% is not a real number,  I may have to retract that.   But let let me see if I can actually prove it using your method.

You want to stick to the post-read statistic, that’s fine.   *I* would interpret that as the number of people who’ve read it, and don’t REPLY saying “Me, too,”  meaning all those READ counts are people who DON’T have the issue (like me, whose read it, but has not had a problem.)

So for the less than 20 people that reported the issue in that one thread titled “Can not longer access mybook…” there are 1600 that didn’t reply, so that means … guess what?    Ooh!  It’s 99%  :smileyvery-happy:

C’mon now.   Be serious.  ;)

You cannot measure the severity of any issue by POST READ COUNT…  

EDIT:  Ooops;  WDTony posted while I was typing…   His numbers would be considered “factual” in my book…

OK Tony, thanks for the honest reply. Bear in mind that the number of people that actually take the time to contact the support centre will be the tip of the iceberg. Most people won’t bother, or won’t know how, and will simpy put up with these problems. Reading through the Smartware forum especially makes me very dubious about there being a small percentage of people experiencing problems.

Maybe I’ve just been really unlucky but in the few weeks I’ve owned this I’ve had major problems with WD Smartware, the MBL drive itself, the WDPhotos app and the WD2Go Pro app, and all I’ve wanted to do is upload files to the thing and access them. Yes, it has been incredibly frustrating, and it has been exacerbated by certain individuals trolling the forum taking issue with anyone who reports these problems. Unbelievably I was even on the receiving end of an aggressive reply telling me that I should have known that WDSmartware is unusable and should not post a complaint about it!

On the plus side, the green light had stopped flashing this evening and I can now get to the UI even though it is so slow it is practically unusable. However I have at least been able to turn on SSH. I am really struggling to understand how you can’t replicate these problems when all I’ve done is copy files to one folder on the MBL after a factory reset.

TonyPh12345 wrote:


CaphWD wrote:    … with hundreds and thousands of reads respectively


Do you REALLY think blah, blah, blah etc

Tony, after your previous post, I can’t take anything you say seriously. I’m still laughing at you so much, your subsequent inane ramblings are blurred to me.

Keep up the posts though, you brighten my day!

suddenly the drive does not mount or change to the green light
froze in solid light blue and yellow
intermitenteintente restore the clip but nothing happened
 I must do to return to normal
what is happening with the unit

perhaps lost data!

please help me!

suddenly the drive does not mount or change to the green light
froze in solid light blue and yellow
intermitenteintente restore the clip but nothing happened

I must do to return to normal
what is happening with the unit
perhaps lost data!

please help me!

CaphWD wrote:



Tony, after your previous post, I can’t take anything you say seriously. I’m still laughing at you so much, your subsequent inane ramblings are blurred to me.

 

Keep up the posts though, you brighten my day!

Well it’s good that you can find something funny about your bad situation.

BTW, my MBL works “fine” - it just doesn’t do what I want.  In case you wanted to add to your anecdotal statistics.

Sorry that it isn’t meeting your expectations. I won’t feign surprise though. What isn’t it doing that you’d like it to?

I wasn’t really pushing stats, anecdotal or otherwise, it was Tony that came up with a 99% figure. I know enough about forums to know that most people are occasional lurkers and gravitate towards threads that ring true with them. Some people have way too much time on their hands and spend way too much time on forums reading every thread posted and don’t realise that they are in the vast minority. The major outage on the VM network on Tuesday prompted only 220 posts on one of the major VM forums yet captured 15000 views and the number of people affected would have been in the millions.

CaphWD wrote:

 The major outage on the VM network on Tuesday prompted only 220 posts on one of the major VM forums yet captured 15000 views and the number of people affected would have been in the millions.

Where / when was this?

Tony, I was beginning to get downhearted again being stuck in on a Friday night with more people posting tales of woe and having read this in a thread on the page 1:-

“However, I would just like to say this. The MBL is a commercial product. And it’s not a particularly cheap commercial product. I find it unacceptable that a product is left for this length of time with such a glaring problem, and the only way to fix it is to “get your hands dirty” with ssh clients etc.”

And then your bewildered head pops up spluttering confusion. My weary heart is lifted once again. Everyone should have a Tony in their life for when they feel downtrodden.

Tony, my parting gift for you is twofold. First wrap your lugs around  this little beauty. Second, make a promise to everyone here that you are going to make a concerted effort to get out more and experience social interaction in a first hand way.

Goodnight Tony.

[Edited to correct link]

Ok, Guys…Slow down this is getting a little bit out of tone. Please let’s keep this thread in a decent tone or we will have to close it.

@CaphWD, since all the solution posted in this thread were not able to solve the issue you are encountering I believe we need to escalate your case to the correct department. 

Already logged Nesvic, I’ve had 4 support tickets going for nearly 3 weeks now. The responses range from, we know WD Smartware doesn’t work but we don’t have a clue how to fix it, through to reset your MBL back to factory defaults. I’ve already reset it to factory defaults once, copied data back to a single folder in public and got exactly the same problems again. They currently want me to reset it factory defaults again to see if this fixes WD Photos not seeing any of my photos/videos. I have to say that the support has been very poor. It’s either copy and pasted stock answers, or reset it back to defaults. Neither of which is helping.

Needless to say, I feel like I’m getting nowhere with this company. Someone else has just started a new thread saying that their MBL is sat there with a flashing green light being unresponsive. Mine is currently taking 45 seconds to serve up the homepage when I connect over HTTP using its IP address and 80 seconds to respond when I click on a link. The chronic unresponsiveness makes WD2GOPro unable to open files also.

The only thing I can think of is that, since WD Smartware doesn’t work, I’ve had to buy my own backup software. I’m using Genie Timeline Pro which is working great, but it copies all my files to a single folder on the Public share. This folder holds a copy of most of the files my HDD in the same folder structure which means that a lot of my files are 9, 10 even 11 folders down. The MBL doesn’t by any chance have a problem with deeply nested files does it? I’m probably clutching at straws here but when all I’ve done is copy files on to the unit, I don’t really have a lot else to go on.

Maybe tempting fate …

My MyBook Live is operating exactly as it should. Been on for number of weeks and all is fine.

that was happening with mine…did you have wd 2go enabled for web access?

i had an address from china hitting mine hard, trying to download my entire 300gb of stuff, and cratering my network.

ghardy2k wrote:

that was happening with mine…did you have wd 2go enabled for web access?

 

i had an address from china hitting mine hard, trying to download my entire 300gb of stuff, and cratering my network.

OK, that’s pretty worrying. I do indeed have WD2GO enabled for web access, it’s a big part of why I bought the unit.

I think I’m getting somewhere with the unit now. Twice I’ve backed up my 125GB to the unit and twice it has gone crazy, become unresponsive and constantly seems to be doing something. Twice I’ve had to factory reset it. This time I disabled Twonky before backing up the 125GB and it hasn’t slowed down at all. It goes to sleep when it should and doesn’t wake up when it shouldn’t.

So, having removed WD Smartware and disabled Twonky, I seem to have a workable NAS. I really wanted the backup software to work, but having spent an extra 25 quid on some different software I’m sorted although I feel like I’ve been ripped off by WD. I really wanted the Twonky server to work because I’ve got an Xbox 360 but I guess I’m going to have to live without it. Now if only I could get WD Photos to show my photos … but that’s a whole other support ticket.

So, is it fit for purpose? No, clearly not, and I’m not basing that on just my experiences. Maybe, when they sort out the software/firmware they’ll be on to a winner, but given that WD Smartware hasn’t worked for nearly 2 years, I won’t be holding my breath.

I’ve had confirmation from WD Support that upgrading to the latest firmware causes a bug that can cause the MBL to malfunction. They have not yet tracked down this bug. It would seem that at least in my case the malfunctioning can be triggered by simply copying files to the Public share. As I’ve already mentioned, turning off the Twonky server prevents the MBL failing in my case.

Why has WD not publicly admitted this? Why is it not mentioned on the WD MBL Firmware download page? If I’d have known this I wouldn’t have updated and I would have waited until it was fixed.

I’ve read through this entire post and am not surprised that there are other issues with this drive.

Hindsight tells me that instead of buying a 2TB network drive that does not work at all, I should have bought

a couple of 2TB drives and put them in a spare PC setup as a file server. I would have had some change in my pocket

along with probably twice the storage but most importantly…RELIABILITY. Not to mention all the hours this

product has consumed.

The bottom line is this…

Your average user ( and I am far from your average user) will simply plug the drive in and expect it to work, period.

When it tells you it needs to update itself most users will allow it to update itself, period. Imagine a 69 year old couple wanting to store thier grandchildren’s photos etc on this virus-like product. Go ahead and tell them to get into the back door and re-configure the linux based server that is on the MBL… Are you serious?

I bought this drive because I wanted storage and I did not want to do exactly what I have been doing. Trying to get this

inferior code ridden product to work. But it does look impressive sitting on the shelf. Makes a great paper weight…expensive though. Just be sure not to power it up and it will work just fine.

Frayed_Ends, you have summed it up so perfectly in that post that I have marked it as a solution.

 

WD need a major reshuffle. Whoever is in charge of programming needs to be cauterised. WD will be hemorrhaging customers because of this person and until there is a major shakeup the company will continue to suffer.

Well unfortunately I bought this product from Dell. And after speaking with them at length they will not accept it as a return since I’ve had it for more than 21 days. I tried to explain to them that it’s taken me more than 21 days to figure out what it was that has been dragging my network down, that plus the fact that none of my PC’s can play videos that are stored locally when this MBL virus is running. 

I’m wondering if it’s worth it to crack the case open and remove the drive. At least that way I’ll have something that

is useable, although at $249 for a 2TB drive is kind of steep. I’ve also noticed that the drive is now nearly half the price it was when it first came out. 

Then again perhaps just putting it in the trash cutting my loses and staying away from WD seems to be the best answer. 

And now Dell also, I’ve bought three Laptops and a desktop along with a laser printer, home theater system etc…

These big companies are only interested in their bottom line profit. Time to go back and building my own PC’s. That’s the only way you’ll know what you are getting. 

I was thinking about Seagate’s 3TB NAS drive, but that too seems to be riddled with problems too.