I have a drive that is fast blinking, has both connected lights to router, has previously worked and today is not connected and fast blinking. Is this an indication that one of the drives has failed? I opened the top and cannot hear any drive activity. No clicking. Drive 1 will click when power is applied, but drive 0 seems to be doing nothing. TIA.
OBE. The drive recovered and reset, but all my files are gone. It’s worthless to have RAID 1 when something fails; the drive defaults to deleting everything and resetting. I’ll never trust my critical files to Western Digital again!
Normally there would be an indication of drive failure which will allow time to backup and replace failed HDD.
Description
A Degraded or Disk Error notification comes from the My Cloud Home mobile app.
The drive has hardware issues or bad sectors that can cause data loss.
Resolution
Backup Data
Back up the data on the My Cloud Home to another location.
Need more help?
- Answer ID 6140: Learn About and How to Use USB Backups on a My Cloud Home
- Answer ID 18911: Steps to Backup, Copy or Move Data Between Drives on Windows or macOS
Replace Degraded Drives
New and replacement drives MUST follow these guidelines.
- Drives must not contain any format or content.
- The new drive must be of the same type, model, and storage capacity.
- Storage capacity cannot be upgraded in the field.
Need more help?
Answer ID 24420: My Cloud Home Hard Drive Compatibility Matrix
Thank you, but the Western Digital Application provided zero warning. I used the application just a day prior, but then I could not access the drive and found it in this strobe warning. I looked up the information and help videos provided by Western Digital and they all blamed my network connectivity to the drive as the first problem. Of course, there is zero consideration for a drive that was working the day prior and the videos are for new drives. Once the dive goes into this strobe warning there is no way to recover your files. You have a perfectly working device one day and a bricked device the next.
Western Digital has been depreciating these drives for the past few years and where you used to have a desktop application to communicate with the dive, Western Digital Discovery, now you are only left with a tablet/phone application and a web-based application. When the drives do decide to fail you are left with blinking lights to try and deduce what is going wrong with zero information from the application. When you follow Western Digital’s Online troubleshooting and I eventually did get the device to reset it wipes all your information. That is a very poor design.
I did notice that when the drive reset they required user names in a slightly different format than when I originally set up the drive. Previously the drive used a username and password, now the drive requires an email address. I guess WD changed how the drive credentials and my system was stuck in a legacy mode. Rather than warn me that this old method of credentialing would cause my drives to brick WD just let a train wreck happen. Another perfect example of Software Engineers too busy making excuses over making good software that works in a way that is useful to consumers.
I know WD don’t care they are the cause of me losing a lot of data. For the cold heartless company that prioritizes profit over customer service, this is just another blip. They don’t care that I won’t ever buy another WD product because I am not an influencer with millions of viewers on YouTube. I am just some loser who trusted the wrong company with my data.
I will go back to the place where I purchased this drive and make sure to give it a 1-star review and a scathing writeup based on my experience. It probably won’t do any good.
From reading some of your notes, it appeared that you have not kept up with the firmware updates or kept it online until recently because the features you noted happened several years ago (Release Date: 11/14/2022) with multiple notifications and warning from Western Digital.
You may have not got warnings on the status and degradation of your hard disk simply because you have not updated the firmware until recently when the device degraded.
My Cloud Home Firmware 8.12.0-178 Release Notes
Version: 8.12.0-178
Release Date: 11/14/2022
Supported Devices: My Cloud Home, My Cloud Home Duo, ibi
Description
This update introduces a new ‘local access feature’ to My Cloud Home, My Cloud Home Duo, and ibi products. This will enable users to use their device in a local network without connecting to the internet once local access is enabled using the dashboard. The Dashboard is a browser interface to enable local access. You can launch the dashboard from the web applications (https://home.mycloud.com/) and (https://ibi.sandisk.com/).
To learn more about local network access, please visit our support article.
This morning, the MYCloud Duo died again with a fast-blink strobe. So it seems that even after I supposedly caused my own problems by not installing this “well-known firmware” (I never received an email from WD, never received a notification for the WD Application on IOS, and only posted on the WD Community site), this made no difference. The drive just returned to its I’m dead figure out what is wrong with this cryptic blinking.
The firmware was 9.xx before this crash and I was able to pull the logs and there was nothing on the SMART about drive failures. It is not a network issue as it was working just fine before the first crash and the second crash (local and direct access.) The drive is now in a pile of to-be-destroyed garbage hardware. Since the drives once contained personal data and I have no way to confirm they were wiped properly, the drives will be removed and physically destroyed before disposal.
Nobody knows more about the state of a MCH Duo than its owner. The OTA update log is in the debuglogs.zip, as well as the smartdata log which will show the identity of the hard disk drive used and the age and hours the drive has been in operation as well as the history of errors.
The MCH or MCH Duo is by itself not a backup solution and RAID1 is not a backup so if you have waited until it stopped working before making a backup or even monitored the debuglogs much earlier then chances of recovery becomes difficult.
WD literally advertises the drive to BACKUP TWICE. Saying it is NOT a BACKUP device is pure hogwash and not what the manufacturer clearly states in their own advertising.
The drive has SMART which should provide some notice of an impending failure and even if one drive just catastrophically failed suddenly that is what the mirrored drive is for.
The drive losing all of my files because of some firmware update is unacceptable. Clearly, WD is not longer a company concerned with data storage.
This may be news to you, but any RAID1 is not backup, not just because MCH Duo or whatever WD advertised.
A backup is a copy of the information that is not attached to the system where the original information is. If you only have an original information and it is sitting on RAID1, the RAID1 is not a backup.
So post your debuglogs.zip with smartdata.log and/or file a support case with WD Tech support. There is no point just posting random claims of wrong doing.
Talk about adding insult to injury. I am contracted by email by Ruqsar K. to let me know that as long as I never pressed reset for more than 60 seconds my data is still on the drive. Just send WD the logs. Well I try to respond to find that my support login is not working. Reset request and nothing. I try to login again and well your account must be disabled.
Thanks, I would send the logs except the drive is back into strobe fast blink mode again and this I am unable to access the drive. When I did have access, for less than a day the drive reported that 3.91 TB was available. I never pressed reset for more than 60 seconds. I am not an expert in Linux file systems, but if my data was on the drive, I had about 1.5TB then I can’t have 3.91 TB free out of a 4TB drive. Not to mention as soon as I connected with IOS it started uploading my photos to the drive. I am sure a portion of my data was overwritten when the drive reset itself.
I removed the drives from the WD enclosure and installed them into a CENMATE enclosure. The drives are just fine and after I booted up into a Ubuntu session I was able to see everything on the drives. I decided to let DiskGenius have a try and after running most of the night it could pull data off the drives.
The data it pulled was after I reconnected with IOS application after the first crash. Whatever caused the enclosure to stop communicating, when it recovered, it wiped the partition tables. If I was willing to have the drives forensically recovered they might find some of my old data, but the cost is not worth the effort. (I have PDF copies of critical documents.) Most of what I lost was the actual data files that produced these PDFs.
It is important to understand that these WD enclosures have three levels of blinking. Slow Breathing, Fast Breathing, and the strobe or fast blink. It is very easy to find information on the web about fast breathing errors and the solutions are NOT the same for a strobe fast blinking. Here is WD article on the different blinking codes:
Note that WD calls this the STROBE LIGHT error and the number one cause… a bad power adaptor.
So if you get the fast-blinking STROBE LIGHT error, immediately UNPLUG your drive unit and search for a replacement adaptor. (Yes, mine was an original WD power adaptor that came with the My Cloud Home Duo.) Any attempt to recover the drive may cause it to reset. I NEVER pressed the reset button for more than 10 seconds, but it did not matter. Don’t touch that reset button.
WD Support was completely worthless. They created a ticket and then disabled my support account while asking for the logs. An expert working for WD should have immediately known about the Strobe Light error and should have advised the correct action (new power adaptor) as opposed to asking for something impossible. I suspect WD has outsourced their support and support personnel are just reading from a script.
I will not be putting the drives back into the WD enclosure. I suspect the enclosure’s serial number is attached to my WD account or I would offer it up to anyone who needs a replacement enclosure. The CENMATE enclosure is a RAID 1 USB 3 enclosure and I will use it to store non-critical files and backups.
I appreciate the help that was provided in the community forum, but once again it led me down the wrong path due to not having an understanding of the error. I would suggest in the future all advice starts with the above article to have a common framework for the discussion. Maybe had I stated STROBE LIGHT error we could have ignored the meaningless discussion on firmware.
