EX4100 has continuous disc activity

[CAL]

Hi,

My EX4100 has one disc that is spinning continuously. That’s disc’s blue LED is blinking and I can hear the sound of drive access (so it isn’t just an LED issue) 100% of the time. The NAS remains responsive on wdmycloud.com but there are long delays when trying to connect to the dashboard on my LAN.

This may be unrelated, but the graphic on the dashboard home screen is wrong about the types of content on the NAS. It shows over 5 TB of movies, but there are hardly any; 5 TB of photos, but there are < TB and 0 TB of other, but that should be the bulk of what I have.

Any thoughts on what it’s doing?

With no external demands, the CPU fluctuates between about 4% and 19%, and the processes using that are:

• wdmcserver
• system daemon

Memory is being used mostly by:

• restsdk-server
• docker

It is setup with Vol 1 as RAID1 on discs 1 & 2. Then Vol 2 is JBOD on disc 3 and the target of a daily internal backup of the Vol 1. Vol 3 is JBOD on disc 4 and the target of a weekly internal backup of Vol 1.

I tested whether it was a problem with the disc 3 by simply removing it. Then disc 4 spun continuously.

Cloud Access is ON, DLNA Server and Itunes are both OFF.

Any help is appreciated!

Craig

[crazy_boy2]

I believe if you turn off cloud access, the activity would also stop. It could be indexing thumbnails for the photos, videos inside.

[CAL]

Thanks for your idea. I did have that problem with my EX2, but it eventually stopped after working through the drive and creating the thumbnails. That seems unlikely this time because the drive has had continuous activity for weeks now. I have just lived with it, assuming it would eventually get through everything. But at this point it seems to be in an infinite loop or something.

As an experiment I did turn off cloud access but it didn’t change the behavior (at least not right away).

Any other thoughts?

Craig

[crazy_boy2]

Yeah, it used to take some time, but eventually finish (took a lot of time, maybe days), if there is no new data being stored on the NAS, then there was no need to start indexing again for the new data.

If I recall correctly, the behaviour is always improved with new firmwares. I remember one firmware limiting this kind of indexing activity in terms of maximum 50% CPU usage. So one option is to ensure that you’re running the latest.

Second, I also suffered this problem initially when I first bought my EX2100. It was constantly working, and I thought it would never stop. However, after a firmware upgrade, and turning off value added services (like DLNA, media streaming, iTunes serving, Cloud Access, etc.) and setting it up only as a file repository, the noises eventually stopped, and it no longer starts indexing when I start storing new data.

I assume that it would take some time for your activity to stop. If it created a new job when you moved some data and when value added services (Cloud Access, etc.) were running, it might still be trying to finish that job, and probably will not create new indexing jobs once the last one finishes. If it’s taking too long, you can always reboot the device from the dashboard.