Thread for people to post their experience of the 1.05.21 firmware release.
The upgrade for me (EX4, w/4x2TB Raid 5) was painless using the GUI interface.
Likes:
GUI much more responsive - very nice!
I like the change to the Backup screen - a nice improvement.
I like that the Shellshock bug is fixed. Nice work.
Issues:
When a USB Backup has commenced, the GUI will then not ssem to move off the Backup panel whatever is selected in the top menu ribbon. Even a log-out wouldn’t respond. The unit basically becomes unresponsive although it is clearly still doing the backup. It looks as though the backup job is taking too much of the CPU to allow the unit to respond. Even an SSH to the unit gets no response.
I’ll post more as I get more experience of the new firmware.
Thread for people to post their experience of the 1.05.21 firmware release.
The upgrade for me (EX4, w/4x2TB Raid 5) was painless using the GUI interface.
Likes:
GUI much more responsive - very nice!
I like the change to the Backup screen - a nice improvement.
I like that the Shellshock bug is fixed. Nice work.
Issues:
When a USB Backup has commenced, the GUI will then not ssem to move off the Backup panel whatever is selected in the top menu ribbon. Even a log-out wouldn’t respond. The unit basically becomes unresponsive although it is clearly still doing the backup. It looks as though the backup job is taking too much of the CPU to allow the unit to respond. Even an SSH to the unit gets no response.
I’ll post more as I get more experience of the new firmware.
It has got worse - the unit requires a hard reset to shut-down then seems to go into a loop under any sort of activity.
The HDD lights are flashing and the unit is unresponsive to the GUI or to a SSH connection attempt. The unit will go into “Shutdown” status on a press of the front panel button, but never shut down. The only remedy is to remove power from the unit.
When the unit restarts, ithe unit goes back into the “busy” state with HDD lights blinking and will not accept connections.
Powering off the unit and re-booting with the rear reset button pressed has brought the unit back…
Unit has been stable over the last day with the new firmware without a re-occurence of the issue. I will test further, but I suspect that it has to do with the USB Backup drive.
As suspected, the unit gets CPU bound when the USB drive is attached.
I was running TOP when connecting the USB drive, and the unit sits at >90% sys and never seems to clear. It gets less than 1% of usr, no idle and the rest is in both io and sirq.
No spare CPU for the GUI to respond, or in fact the ability to handle any conections. TOP is very sluggish.
You can see the disk LEDs hammering while all this is happening.
Removing the USB doesn’t make any difference, the unit stays pegged with >90% sys and the disks remaining busy.
Pushing the front panel button gets “Shutdown” displayed, but it has no effect, and 2 hours later the unit is still pegged with high “sys” and no “usr”.
The unit needs to be Reset for it to come back properly.
It’s bricked. Your files will still be OK, but you will need to mount them individually on a Linux system (or something with a Linux VM) to get them off.
Call WD suport and get them to talk you through it.
I found the same. It looks as if the firmware upgrade completed OK as the front panel shows the new version and the blue power LED is solidly lit. All 4 disks (RAID 5) in my system are constantly being accessed. I did a hard power off and disconnected my external USB drive and the system started up normally and is responding in the usual expected way. All shares and users available. Also the read and write speeds are noticeably faster than before (read/write to my PC at 80Mb/sec and 50Mb/sec respectively for large files).
Judging by the lack of posts here, this upgrade is going much smoother than the previous ones. Also, since upgrading, I’ve lost power three times and there have been no issues starting back up.
Re: Read/Write performance. Checked more specifically this morning.
PC network interface is Gigabit Ethernet via a HP V1910 24 port switch to the WD EX4
HP Switch to WD EX4 network uses the 2 x Gigabit Ethernet ports as 802.3ad link aggregation.
WDEX4 has 4 x 4TB WD RED NAS drives configured as RAID 5.
Read performance with a large file (1Gbyte+) is ~100 to 100Mbytes per second.
Write performance with a large file (1Gbyte+) is ~50 to 55 Mbytes per second.
Downside is the seemingly non-functional USB interface now (unless someone has solved that problem) which means I cannot do a local backup of important files.
Hello all, I’m a new owner of an EX4 with version 1.02.08 installed, and automatic update disabled. There hasn’t been any activity on this thread for 4 months (since November 2014). If anyone can please let me know how it is going with the update to 1.05.21 I would be very appreciative. I don’t know whether I should do it or not.
