After a decade of coveting the My Cloud EX2/Mirror Raid I finally bought two EX2 Ultra Diskless enclosures along with two WD 10TB Gold drives to give me an upgrade to 20TB/10TB mirrored. After spending several days on copying the data over from my 8TB My Cloud, everything is finally quiet now.
I do have tentative plans to strip the single bay 8TB My Clouds to be used in my second EX2 enclosure to sell? to backup my other EX2? to test and play around? no idea, but substituting a 2TB drive into the empty My Clouds might be an tempting adventure.
So apparently the EX2 ultra runs the same OS3 Busybox as My Cloud Gen2, because my sleep script does work on the EX2, that was until I decided to post about it and the drive woke up. I had to SSHed in and killed the openVPN and anything I thought might be the culprit; the thing is, after half a decade, I still don’t know why our clouds wake up and I don’t think WD knows either.
However, this I do know, is that if you connect via AFP to the device and leave it mapped as a drive on your Mac Desktop, it will never sleep until you eject the drive. Connected via SMB and left mapped on your desktop, is ok. Although I don’t have any sleep and wake up logs, every time I wake up to go pee I have never seen it awake over the last two years.
I am also pretty sure that any WD program that is running on your laptop would probably wake the drive just to see if it was sleeping.
One thing to note that my script isn’t permanent. It is run every time I turn on sleep in the dashboard. It is run whenever I think it needs to be run, like after accessing the drive via my iPhone, it is run when you first turn on your My Cloud. WD is notorious for starting up the various scan servers even when you have disabled them.
Right now my new EX2 is blinking its lazy blue eye and I am pretty stoked about the fact it asleep.
About AFP
Now the only reason that I was using AFP was because when I was using SMB for copying files from old My Cloud to new EX2 My Cloud, it locked itself one night. SMB has problems in reading a directory that has 20,000 files and other directories in it, like my Midi file collection that is in the range of over 200,000 files, or my ebook directory. When I say locked, it is more like waiting. It just sat there in its copying process; no cloud activity, in fact my EX2 fell asleep during this process.
So I switched to AFP and that got it through the file copy process without a hitch. I am no longer sure if AFP is slower than SMB, but I like to switch back to SMB when possible.
The EX2 is about twice as fast as the single drive My Cloud, clocked at around 100MB/s read/write in comparison to 48MB/s read/write 8TB My Cloud.
Right now my EX2 is still sleeping all through the duration of typing up this post. I did kill the OpenVPN service by do PS -A to see what is running, then using the command kill xxxx where xxxx is the job id number on the leftmost column.
Here is my script for both the Gen2 Cloud and EX2.
#!/bin/bash
/etc/init.d/wdphotodbmergerd stop
/etc/init.d/wdmcserverd stop
/etc/init.d/wdnotifierd stop
/etc/init.d/wddispatcherd stop
killall crond
drive_sleep.sh off
sleep 1
drive_sleep.sh on
hd_standby.sh 5
Remember that this isn’t a permanent script and it needs to run every time you do something with the My Cloud or EX2 like mapping the my cloud to your Mac. Use it afterwards when you eject the drive.
So that is it… I’m moving over to the EX2 forum now… good bye…
