USB external drives showing 0kb

Folks, 

My WD My Cloud will not show an external USB drive no matter what I do. I have tried a USB 3 enclosure, and USB 2 enclosure with a completely different USB controller. One has a 2TB drive and the other a 500GB drive. I have formatted them as FAT, exFAT, and NTFS. I have broken them up into smaller partitions. They are seen in the My Cloud USB button at the top right of the UI. It names the USB controller. However it shows a 0KB drive every time. I have attached a jpg for clarification. This is just one of the drives I tried. These drives/enclosures are seen within multiple Windows 8 stations and can be written to and read from, and display the correct space available. I have the latest v03.01.03-127 firmware. Thoughts?

Looks like a glitch in the UI.  You should be able to write to it still.

Nope. Safepoints tell me there isn’t enough room on the volume.

Have you tried eliminating the partitions? See if a formatted NTFS 1 partition will work.

nm

I think the takeaway here is that USB / SATA bridges are not supported.

TonyPh12345 wrote:

I think the takeaway here is that USB / SATA bridges are not supported.

 

Interesting… 

whsbuss wrote:


TonyPh12345 wrote:

I think the takeaway here is that USB / SATA bridges are not supported.

 


Interesting… 

I shouldn’t think so. What were they expecting us to insert in that port? Even if it’s a branded WD external drive, it’s using a USB/SATA bridge of some varying brand. WD doesn’t make their own. 

whsbuss wrote:

Have you tried eliminating the partitions? See if a formatted NTFS 1 partition will work.

Yes. I’ve killed the partitions many times and created FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS partitions in 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB sizes. Each time Windows saw it and wrote to and read from it  just fine. I even plugged it into the My Cloud unformatted with a RAW partition to see if it would try to format it itself and make it happy. No love.

Bridges in external drives are almost always transparent bridges. You’ll never see the bridge in a device manager. I would bet you DO see your dock in the device manager on your PC?

TonyPh12345 wrote:
Bridges in external drives are almost always transparent bridges. You’ll never see the bridge in a device manager. I would bet you DO see your dock in the device manager on your PC?

No. Well maybe. The only thing that changes in Device Manager is a new Disk Drive. Not the controller. Nothing under HID (USB stuff), nothing under IDE ATAPI/ATA. I do see USB mass storage device when it plugs in. But I couldn’t fathom NOT seeing that with ANY external USB drive. Also I’m not sure what you are meaning by a dock, I will paste in the link to the amazon page for one of my enclosures below:

USB 3 external SATA drive enclosure

Well, the Cloud certainly sees the enclosure (same as a dock in this context), not the drive. I have six or seven USB drives (not including flash devices) and they all are recognized just fine on the cloud…

Here’s what it looks like with my 500GB USB 3.0 WD Elements portable drive:

TonyPh12345 wrote:

Here’s what it looks like with my 500GB USB 3.0 WD Elements portable drive:

 

Then mine needs an RMA.

TonyPh12345 wrote:

Here’s what it looks like with my 500GB USB 3.0 WD Elements portable drive:

 

Do you have any non-WD external drives that work in it?

desolat wrote:

Do you have any non-WD external drives that work in it?

I’ll take back part of what I said.    I have a Seagate ST310003 in a AcomDataenclosure, and it’s working fine, too.

The Cloud recognizes (and reports) the bridge and recognizes the full capacity of the drive.  I had to look in the debugs to actually tell what the HD model was.

You can always look in the debug logs, too, and see what’s going on when you plug yours in.

Turn on SSH.

SSH into the drive.

after plugging in the drive, wait 10-15 seconds, then do:

CloudNAS:~# cat /var/log/messages
[snipped earlier output]
Oct 11 06:45:56 CloudNAS kernel: [761651.935273] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 2 using xhci-hcd
Oct 11 06:45:56 CloudNAS kernel: [761651.965923] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0c0b, idProduct=b157
Oct 11 06:45:56 CloudNAS kernel: [761651.972754] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=10, Product=11, SerialNumber=3
Oct 11 06:45:56 CloudNAS kernel: [761651.980217] usb 1-1: Product: DMI USB2.0 Storage
Oct 11 06:45:56 CloudNAS kernel: [761651.985037] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: DMI
Oct 11 06:45:56 CloudNAS kernel: [761651.988916] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: 200811080DFD
Oct 11 06:45:56 CloudNAS kernel: [761652.003315] usb 1-1: ep 0x81 - rounding interval to 32768 microframes, ep desc says 0 microframes
Oct 11 06:45:56 CloudNAS kernel: [761652.012394] usb 1-1: ep 0x2 - rounding interval to 32768 microframes, ep desc says 0 microframes
Oct 11 06:45:56 CloudNAS kernel: [761652.054750] scsi4 : usb-storage 1-1:1.0
Oct 11 06:46:09 CloudNAS kernel: [761664.909138] scsi 4:0:0:0: Direct-Access ST310003 33AS PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 CCS
Oct 11 06:46:09 CloudNAS kernel: [761664.918503] sd 4:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
Oct 11 06:46:09 CloudNAS kernel: [761664.924537] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] 1953525168 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/931 GiB)
Oct 11 06:46:09 CloudNAS kernel: [761664.932971] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
Oct 11 06:46:09 CloudNAS kernel: [761665.030093] sdb: sdb1 sdb2 < sdb5 >
Oct 11 06:46:09 CloudNAS kernel: [761665.053067] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
[snip]
Oct 11 06:46:12 CloudNAS kernel: [761668.635389] EXT4-fs (sdb1): warning: checktime reached, running e2fsck is recommended
Oct 11 06:46:13 CloudNAS kernel: [761668.916090] EXT4-fs (sdb1): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null)

Well I’ve recently removed the drive that had my SuSE installation on it (let’s not get into arguments over distros, I take a lot of heat rounds over my SuSE preference) and re-used the drive for other things. I could download putty for windows so I can SSH into the NAS, but I’ve gotten a PM from some WD folks and given them a log report, so I will wait to see what they come up with. Thanks for that info however, I was thinking that they may have crippled the thing to only accepting WD products in the USB port.

were ever able to get the USB 3.0 to work? i’m having the same thing with a 4TB Seagate Backup Plus drive. 

kashman wrote:

were ever able to get the USB 3.0 to work? i’m having the same thing with a 4TB Seagate Backup Plus drive. 

…then do what’s described in Post 16 and post the results.

Sorry for not posting, yes I got it working. I was working with a WD Engineer on this and they were able to repeat the issue with a few drives. What they found is with a Windows 8 machine, it has some sort of a different dismount of USB drives. He said do not use exFAT first of all, because this is not supported. Then before you eject the drive from your windows machine, do a chkdsk on it. Even if no errors are found, this seems to be a repeatable successful workaround. Then be sure to do a safe eject by using the USB icon in the lower right tray, and only then, pull the USB plug from the windows machine. Then plug it into the My Cloud and on mine, it seems to take almost a full 60 seconds to show all the info. The USB indicator will light up soon after the physical plug-in, but the details of the drive show up much later. Plug it in, and WAIT. My drive is working every time using these steps. Also, as long as I don’t plug it back into a windows machine, it works in the My Cloud every time successfully, albeit still takes up to 60 seconds to populate the drive’s partitions properly.

Sorry for such a wordy reply, trying to be detailed.