4TB My Cloud Review: A disappointment so far

Picked up a 4TB for a great price but the performance is quite disappointing. Looking for any advice for improvement before I decide to return this if nothing improves.

Cons:

Remote Access is not working due to Java 7 issues as noted in the forum. (no fix from WD)

Requires My Cloud Desktop for access, which seems to have embedded Apple code (bloatware).

Twonky Media Server is very slow (Indexing and browsing), with limited settings under port 9000

Twonky Online simply refuses to connect after successful registration (??)

Buggy WD s/w for USB 3.0 support, cannot dismount attached USB drive. Unplugging locked up My Cloud, requiring a power restart (not a good thing for any Linux server).

No Backup s/w found, do I have to pay WD for the backup s/w? (d/l version is Trial)

Pros:

Fast gigabit networking under Windows shares (best thing so far)

USB 3.0 copying to seed media folders is pretty fast (just cannot dismount after)

Fast file transfer when using 3rd party Sync s/w to seed the media files (much safer but slower than USB)

Nice low power efficiency 4w idle to about 10w operational (compare to PC running FreeNAS)

Thanks everyone.

What firmware version are you running? 

The Java issue is really a change in how Java does security, you will have to open the Java control panel and add your wdmycloud device to a security menu. Many applications are caught in this situation.

I should also note that the latest firmware seems to make the system a bit more responsive and once the thumbnail process, convert, completed it really settled down and is mostly idle now.  It was mostly 99% busy before the new firmware.

I am running the latest firmware. As soon as I installed it, I had a message that there was a new firmware. I decided to upgrade before I added any files.

Not too crazy with WD using a Web browser for the Dashboard. I had my Popups disabled in general and that caused me some grief in launching the update. It did start the update but I did not see any message. When I killed the Dashboard and relogged in, I saw that it was in the updating process.

The Dashboard freezes when My Cloud h/w is busy. The whole setup seems a bit fragile in terms of UI.

Hopefully, you are right that it will settle down after generating all the media thumbnails. Meantime, the access from the media renderer (Dish Hopper) side  is really slow.

Thanks!

Not sure what you’re comparing it to, but every NAS I’ve ever seen uses a web-based dashboard.

WD does offer a non-web, host-based software dashboard that has some of the functions available… You can download it in the download section.

The web pages don’t use pop-ups at all, so I’m not sure what your issue was with that. 

Yes, the dashboard does slow down (Sometimes quite a bit) when it’s doing something heavy.

Thanks for the feedback.

I am using IE and it does report that it blocked the popup. The status feedback does open up a new small window when I have now allowed the Dashboard for popup.

I do agree that the MyCloud Desktop works quite well. However, you need to install it. That is what I am using for now, along with the native Share folders under Window Explorer.

We’ll see if the media serving improves after a day or so. If not, this is going back since DLNA server was the main reason for getting this.

A shame since the unit seems very fast network-wise, so the h/w must be pretty decent.

The My Cloud Desktop app is just for file transfers.  The program I’m talking about is Quick View.  It’s more of a control panel.

How do you navigate to this “Status feedback” pop-up?   I’ve got pop-up-blockers on all my browsers and haven’t seen anything blocked (that I noticed, at least.)

I’ll look for Quick View in the WD downloads.

The IE on my Win7 system reports if any site tries to launch a pop-up. You are given the choice of allow once or changing the setting to authorize the pop-up. The problem is that you need to re-try the access after you allow the pop-up. I did do that in IE but My Cloud had already started the firmware updating and just ignored my attempts.

Of course, I thought it was locked up. I logged out and got back in with a new browser window. That is when I saw the smaller window saying it is updating. Good thing I did not turn off the unit or it would have “bricked” it for good.

BTW, do you have any suggestions on how to dismount an attached USB drive from My Cloud? The Dashboard does not have any commands. The Desktop App has a disconnect selection but it does not do anything. After copying over my files via an attached USB 3.0 HD, I had to simply unplug it. My Cloud locked up and I had to do a power reset. Luckily, it recovered but I don’t want to risk it again. It runs Linux and I never do that in that OS w/o dismounting.

There is a little USB icon at the top of the dashboard. Click it and it will list the usb devices, and you eject from there.

Yes, I saw the icon.

However when I had a USB 3.0 HD mounted, I did not get a dismount or eject command showing up. I am now doing all the copying via the network. Using a sync tool (FullSync) seems the most reliable method for me.

I also noted that the Media Server did not rebuild the database after I did the sync. Twonky screen shows Shares are set at -1 (meaning rebuild if new files appear). I ended up manually triggerring Rebuild via the Dashboard.

This can be a decent system if WD works on fixing all the Media Server pains. Someone here said theis version of Twonky is very new. No excuses to release it like this. DLNA servers been around a long time. I had a free Tversity running on a Windows Home Center for almost 5 years w/o an update (the new versions are not free). I was looking for a more power efficient solution. My Cloud 4TB fits the bill compared to a PC with multiple HDs.

Thanks.

 You can eject the usb drive via the WD QuickView icon on the Windows taskbar.

@ pplwin

You have to click the Eject icon in the Dashboard when you open it, it is in the under left corner, it’s small and sometimes you have to click a couple of times with the mouse cursor and it will unlock from the WDMC and you can take it off and reboot the WDMC or Shutdown. This is good practice, because sometimes it is still writing something to the USB drive. So eject it before removal. :wink: And you can also do it via WD quick view. I think it is better through the WDMC Dashboard.

Completelly agree with you… I think I will buy a Synology NAS and put the disk from mycloud. With my mac I have to wait 30 seconds for just open a folder.

Hey folks I have identical symptoms - reboot (pull plug, wait for 20, replug)  WD MyCloud 4TB  with latest 230 firmware.  Everything will work fine for a while then it will grind to a halt.  The web interface is slow.  Server connections take minutes to display a simple directory listing, or never come back at all.  If you listen to the drive itself, it is grinding constantly and very hot.  Connecting takes minutes and sometimes fails.  Apple Time Machine backups start working but then struggle.  

Some things I tried:  set up a static IP (this seemed to work but I don’t think it really did anything other than give me confidence of what IP address to use)  disable DLNA (this may have actually helped a little)  disable iTunes Library Sharing (i think this might have helped too but not sure)  and finally some things suggested by JosephNG in this thread that so far has appeared to help tremendously.  Server CPU load has dropped and now directory listings come up after only a brief tolerable few seconds lag. 

http://community.wd.com/t5/WD-My-Cloud/MyCloud-Device-Disconnects-Itself-from-the-Network-Daily/td-p/742978/highlight/false/page/4

JosephNG

   login via SSH and type the following two commands 

   /etc/rc2.d/./S85wdmcserverd stop

   /etc/rc2.d/./S86wdphotodbmergerd stop

   My device run very well for more than 3 weeks (except that I cannot view photos from “WD photos” iphone app)

Hi guys - just wanted to let you know that the most recent firmware update did not resolve this problem.   My WDMyCloud is still having big problems with a process called “wdmcserver” which is taking 64% of the CPU and 49+ hours.  Another big process is wdphotodbmerger which has used 59+ hours of CPU and competes for the top spot on “top” with the wdmcserver.  the third culprit is pfe_ctrl_timer with 19+hours of CPU. with only 6 days of uptime, what looks like nearly 100% cpu utilization over 5.3 of those days is too much.  I am rebooting and stopping those processes again but guys please fix this in a future firmware update!!  this should be pretty simple - if you need more info from my box to help fix this please let me know.  

top - 17:04:36 up 6 days, 10:04,  1 user,  load average: 8.21, 7.73, 6.61

Tasks:  99 total,   1 running,  98 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie

%Cpu(s): 25.2 us,  5.1 sy,  9.7 ni,  0.0 id, 57.9 wa,  0.0 hi,  2.1 si,  0.0 st

KiB Mem:    232448 total,   184640 used,    47808 free,     2624 buffers

KiB Swap:   500672 total,   119552 used,   381120 free,    60928 cached

 

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S  %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND           

 6906 root      20   0 46912  11m 2112 S  51.2  5.0  59:25.69 wdphotodbmerger   

 6847 root      20   0 37760 9792 2560 S  26.1  4.2  50:09.62 wdmcserver        

18629 root      20   0  4096 3584 1856 D   1.3  1.5   0:00.04 ls                

 2387 root      20   0     0    0    0 D   0.6  0.0  19:08.74 pfe_ctrl_timer    

18430 root      20   0  4352 1728  832 R   0.6  0.7   0:01.54 top               

  277 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   0.3  0.0   1:10.02 kswapd0           

 4134 root      20   0 56576 1408  768 S   0.3  0.6   0:29.05 apache2           

18631 root      20   0  2432 1728  960 S   0.3  0.7   0:00.01 grep              

18632 root      20   0  2688 1920 1088 S   0.3  0.8   0:00.01 sed               

22090 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   0.3  0.0   0:27.77 kworker/1:2       

    1 root      20   0  2752  640  384 S   0.0  0.3   0:18.05 init              

    2 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.02 kthreadd          

    3 root      20   0     0    0    0 D   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 cpu1_hotplug_th   

    4 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:24.53 ksoftirqd/0       

    7 root      rt   0     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0       

Linux WDMyCloud 3.2.26 #1 SMP Tue Jun 17 15:53:22 PDT 2014 wd-2.2-rel armv7l