I just installed this unit yesterday. Did a huge backup overnight which completed successfully of Adobe Phototshop Elements and this morning both drives were, I assume, asleep. Ttried to wake them up but could not. Unplugged the unit to reboot the whole system. One drive light is blinking blue. I have two WD red drives in there as JBODs. A 1TB and a 3TB. The admin interface says the drives are healthy. So why can’t I see this unit to look at files? Not a good 1st impression. I work for an Enterprise class storage company and my customers would NOT be happy with a similar result.
If you’re in the admin interface, the drives are not asleep. They wake up as soon as you access the UI.
As to why you can’t see your shares, well, we’ll need more information that what you’ve provided…
What do you mean by “I can’t see this unit…” well, yes, you can – you’re accessing the UI.
I agree with TonyPh12345 that I’d need more details to understand your situation.
My EX2’s internal WD Red drive (I just have one for now in JBOD) have no trouble falling asleep after the stipulated time I set in the sleep settings via dashboard. I have however discovered that for any attached USB drives, only WD external drives fall asleep after the time (clearly indicated by the fading in and out white LED on my WD My Book) but my non-WD drive (Hitachi Touro) isn’t put to sleep. I have been putting them to sleep manually (actually called standby mode) via the ‘hdparm -y /dev/sdb’ (or /dev/sdc) depending on which USB port the non-WD external drive is attached to. But I honestly don’t like this…so I’m thinking of putting a script in to do this as a cron job but I still am not feeling happy about this solution since it should’ve been power-managed by EX2, as I can see it supports that feature just like my WD My Book when I run hdparm -I to get info on either USB drive.
EDIT: I know the Hitachi isn’t sleeping on it’s own as I can hear it spin…but as soon as I issue the hdparm command, I can hear the Hitachi’s drive spin to a gradual halt and silence. I am able to wake the drive back up when I next access it but then I have to remember to issue a hdparm standby command again.and sometimes I forget that when I access the dashboard UI, it wakes the attached drives up as well, so I need to remember to issue the command then as well. Need to add a cron job to do this but haven’t had the time to do it so far.
Ok, had some spare time to get familiar with this unit. When I said I couldn’t “see” the WDEX2 in Windows File Explorer, I find that i can see the unit as a whole when I click on network. Now, I was attempting to do a backup of an application and pointing it to the WDEX2 and the folder I creatd called Backups. I couldn’t find it when the file “browse to” opened. What I discivered is that you have to map that Share (Or folder as WD uses these interchangably) to a windows drive letter. Once I did that, I could “browse to” that share (or folder) in the application. So everything works as expected. What is interesting to me is that the drives don’t appear in WIndows Disk Manager.
I do have another question pertaining to accessing your files from the web. I enabled this feature and now I am seeing what others have posted in that the CPU is bouncing off the roof with indexing files. Not sure if anything can be done with that short of turning that feature off.
I really like the interface. Very nice. I have used other NAS devices such as IOCell which is what this is replacing. Totally different in features.
In Windows, your shares won’t show up in Windows explorer since they are Network shares. Even without mapping the drive to a letter you can easily find them if you go to My Network, which is just a click away if you already have Windows explorer open…or directly open My Network from Start menu. Under My Network you will see the EX2 and when you open that you’ll see all the shares…you can either copy files or whatever directly after opening any share that you have permissions to or rt-click on a share to map to a drive letter and then copy files.
And I do like the dashboard interface too…just a few minor quibbles I have. Which is that I hate the fact that you can’t get rid of the Public folder but there is at least a way to turn ftp access off to that folder, but only via SSH interface. Normally that Public share is available to any ftp user if you have ftp enabled.
