Basic unanswered questions about WD My Cloud

I have some interest in purchasing a WD My Cloud type of device but have some questions that I’m having difficulty answering.

One of the principal uses of network attached storage (NAS) is backup. Another is consolidation of storage space for use by multiple systems where those systems operate under control of different operating systems. When it comes to reliability a basic concern is what happens when when the NAS device, rather than the installed drives, fails.

After reviewing the user manual (UM) for My Cloud EX2 Ultra I was unable to answer a few very basic questions as follows:

  1. What file system/s are supported? Based on UM instructions for formatting it looks like there may only be one.
  2. Can drives installed and formated on the My Cloud device be removed and and accessed by a computer (e.g., using a suitable USB enclosure)?
  3. Can drives that have been previously formatted on a computer be installed and used on a My Cloud device?
  4. If so can such drives be partitioned?

Published information suggests that My Cloud is supported on Windows and Macintosh computers. To use the cloud (i.e., file synchronization) features complimentary software that runs on the client computers would be expected to impose such limitations. However, SMB support should allow other devices to connect which would include computers operated by Linux. It also seems that a wide variety of devices that support uPnP protocols should also be supported.

  • Is the Windows/Macintosh restriction limited to cloud support?

There is no question about file system, as it can be accessed on Windows as well as on macOS. Also remote access uses web browser interface to provide data file access.

Drives in multibay My Cloud device are user serviceable, i.e. can be remove or replace from its enclosure but need to connect them back into its enclosure in order to access data. But unable to access data if connect them in different enclosure due to its hardware encryption feature.

WD recommends to use WD Red drives in My Cloud enclosure as it provide NAS environment which meant for 24 hours working specification.

These questions arise primarily from wanting to know what can be done if the My Cloud device fails. This is a problem I’m dealing with right now with a different brand of NAS. The NAS failed but the disk drives appear to be fine which is something I can tell because I can remove them install them in a USB enclosure and mount them on a USB port. It happens that even though my computers are primarily Windows based I do have some systems that run under Linux and I suspect that the NAS is based on Linux since the file system it uses appears to be ext2.

From what you say, it sounds like the problem with the WD My Cloud devices is the encryption. My data doesn’t need to be encrypted and I don’t need what you are probably referring to by the term “cloud”. In that, what I’m after is old fashioned NAS. If I could do local file synchronization on my own network somewhat like Dropbox and other cloud services that would be nice but I’m not looking for remote access from outside the facility where my LAN operates.

Can the encryption by turned off? If so, would this allow the drives to be removed and taken to another computer for the purpose of recovering files when and if the My Cloud device fails? Single point of failure is what I’m totally opposed to.

Now that I have a device to experiment with I have some of the answers:

  1. When the My Cloud device formats the drive it creates 4 primary partitions. The one of most concern which is where it appears that the user data is stored is an EXT4 file system which is the most prevalent kind found on Linux systems. This kind of device is typically based on an open source kernel and other software contained in Linux software distributions. So this is not surprising. The NAS device I’m replacing used an EXT2 file system which as one might guess is an earlier version of EXT4.

  2. Yes! The encryption can be turned off and the drive can be mounted on a Linux based operating system and the data is accessible.

  3. Probably NOT owing to the presence of the 3 extra partitions. One of these appears to be a Linux Swap partition. Another is a small EXT4 file system.

  4. While it might be possible to create these partitions on a Linux system this might amount to asking for trouble.

Finally, the user data stored on the device can be accessed using a Linux system. In that, should the WD My Cloud device fail there is a way to recover the data from the drives it has been using. You might want to carefully evaluate the need for encryption before enabling that feature. My recollection is that the default option is to NOT use encryption.

Following is a screenshot of the gparted display of the device just installed and initialized in my My Cloud EX2 Ultra device.: