Drive fails My Cloud Scan Disk, Plex won't start, drive SMART totally fine

My main WD Red 4tb NAS drive in my My Cloud EX 2 Ultra fails the Scan Disk test. This seems to be linked to Plex refusing to start up at all as well.

  1. When I connect the drive to Windows, the SMART data says it’s totally fine. The WD Drive Tools also says that it’s fine.
  2. If I format the drive in the My Cloud EX and start again, Scan Disk test says that it passes the test. Then when installing Plex, plex now miraculously runs fine.
  3. A day later, Plex is not working again. I scan the disk in Scan Disk and it fails the test. I plug it into a PC and all the tests are fine again.
    4.Formatting the drive and starting again, Scan Disk test says that it passes.
    Etc.

Is there something wrong with the My Cloud EX 2 Ultra itself that is corrupting the OS?

WD support is really bad, and they don’t seem to care, just quoting lines that aren’t relevant from the knowledge base. I guess I’ve got to dump this NAS and get a Synology. I feel like now WD are selling QNAP products on their shop they probably want people to just give up on their WD hardware so they don’t need to support any more.

try a new disk at least you can use that new disk with another NAS

I use both type and find the setup for WD NAS is faster for a new user but the other have many more options –

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I have a second disk and it does exactly the same, despite the disk passing every disk health test on a pc. I notice lots of threads on here about 'red drive light’s with people buying new drives that instantly fail, and rma-ing drives that are probably totally fine.

Next time you connect the drive to Windows, run CHKDSK in read-only mode. This will identify any problems with the file system metadata.