Like many others on these forums, I am suffering from the “drive rarely goes to sleep” issue even though the dashboard status is Idle. My Firmware is v04.05.00-342 and I have tried all the recommendations posted here and switched off all the redundant options on the dashboard and stopped the sanning / thumbnail issue via SSH but something is still triggering the drive.
I raised a ticket with WD Support and their response was to do a full system restore. I am loathed to do this as a) I would need to backup the drive contents somewhere (the irony of backing up the backup !!) and b) there is no guarantee that this will resolve the problem.
I have downloaded the System Logs but WD Support say that it is not within their remit to provide any guidance on how to interpret them. So basically I am looking for some guidance as to which parts of the logs I can look at to try and determine what is triggering my drive to remain active. Is it a process within the drive or is it something on my network that is causing it to remain active.
As it stands just now, I am concerned that this continual activity will seriously affect the life of the drive.
While this won’t answer your main question about how to read the logs. The unfortunate reality with the single bay/single drive My Cloud and the Sleep issue is there is no one single fix for the unit not remaining in hibernation. As the many, many, many past discussions on this issue indicate what works for one to solve their sleep issues may not work for others. The general conclusions seems to be it’s a combination of the various firmware options for scanning the drive for media and for remote access to how Samba/SMB operates.
The Samba/SMB is one big problem on my first gen v4.x My Cloud. Any time I bring a Windows PC out of sleep/hibernation mode it sends network or windows broadcast packets/data that triggers the My Cloud to wake up.
After spending many, many, many hours dealing with this sleep issue I pretty much gave up trying to solve the problem. Tried numerous fixes that worked for others, including turning off via the user-start script in the firmware to various limited degrees of success. While some users could get many hours of sleep out of the changes, I never could get more than one or two hours even at night when the device is not used. I too looked at the logs in an effort to figure out why it wakes up. Eventually I gave up trying to fix this stupid problem and just live with it. Make sure to use the Dashboard Safepoint feature (or use an rsync script) to backup the My Cloud data so in the event of a drive crash you still have the data which can be restored to another hard drive or NAS.
If you haven’t done so already you can read to your hearts content the many methods many of us have used to try and deal with the sleep issue.
Bennor, thanks very much for the quick and really helpful reply. I always feared that I would be clutching at straws trying to get this resolved, the numerous / similar posts on these forums is evidence of that. I have always said that I really liked my WD but that it was let down by poor firmware and software. As you say, maybe it’s time to accept that it is what it is and make sure the Safepoint is activated and start looking at alternative backup solutions. I just don’t like to be beaten and not forgetting the question whether am I really getting what I paid for.
