Been thinking about all these problems with some MBLs that are suffering from problems like the Dashboard UI failing, or an upgrade bricking the drive and other problems.
A questions that are not really asked is who usually just “pulls the power plug” regularly without correctly shutting down their MyBook Live?
Do you suffer from power brown-outs?
Do you have a pre-pay electricity meter and frequently forget to put credit on it so it just trips-off?
That and a few others could create file system corruption even on a journalled file system as if you’re unlucky the journal can become corrupted.
Also, if the Winchester drive’s internal cache disabled or enabled? What if there is a fair bit of data waiting in some RAM disc cache waiting to be written and the power goes off?
A file system corruption might not cause an immediate failure but could cause a problem some time after the corruption?
On Windows NTFS file system I’ve had, rare, situations where a file could not be erased or changed. NTFS is a journalled file system and there was still a corruption. Not evident at the time of the corruption but some time after. Could be days or weeks.
Would be interested to see if some MyBook Live owners have experienced these problem.
I’m not on a battery backup unit, so when I see lightning coming I shut it down. or if we’ll be out of the house for more than two days.
The only time I “pulled the plug” was when my first firmware update to 1.03 or something got stuck in the final update/reboot portion.
The poll I want to see is how many people bought their drives at a retail brick and mortar, vs who got them delivered via UPS etc from some online warehouse. I wonder if handling of the drives up to the point you started using it has any correlation.
Hmm… Don’t just pull the plug. You’re asking for problems with your MyBook Live. I know there are a few people on here who are adamant that the journalled EXT4 Linux file system is infallable but quite a number of years of experience has proved to me not to be too trusting of journalled file systems.
Command your MBL to shut down properly so the LED turns off and the drive spins down before pulling the plug.
Philgo wrote:
I’m a new user and I turn mine off every day, I just make sure the Led is blue or solid green.
I gotta agree- Don’t ever just kill power unexpectedly. While it likely won’t harm the unit, there is always a chance something will happen. 3TB is a lot of data to lose over the 20 seconds it takes to log in and shut it down proper. If you have power outages like that, I’d recommend a UPS for sure.
I think you are onto something. I had my MBL for over a month with few problems. Then, I was trying one evening to set a static IP address and things got flaky - in fact, it seemed to be hung. I cycled the power and things got worse. I noticed over time that cycling the power at certain times made things worse instead of better.
At one point, I thought my MBL was bricked. I searched the forum and figured I was SOL since I had not turned on SSH or FTP. I put in an RMA request. In the meantime, I left it unplugged from the network for a day as it was hanging my wife’s new HP box with Windows 7. Eventually I had a solid green LED. I cycled power the next day and the UI was back. I quickly turned on SSH and FTP. I immediately backed up everything.
After a week with no problems, we had a power outage late yesterday evening for about 2 seconds. Now, my MBL has a yellow LED and will do nothing else. Fortunately, I have the replacement already at the house from the RMA request.
This is the flakiest box I have ever seen. It works, then it doesn’t. The only thing it is consistent about is it’s inconsistency.
This is the most solid home NAS I have ever purchased.
But then, I do not unplug or just kill the power ever. There were a few power outages but luckily it was not affected.
Any system regardless of brand can be affected by sudden power outage, what you do expect? Especially systems with mechanical hard drives.
To turn off power, it can be done via the dashboard or from the CLI by typing “shutdown -r 0”
