I’ve reached the point where I’m spending more time trying to get my WDMyCloud working properly than is worth the effort.
I’m on the verge of simply yanking the drive out and using it in an enclosure as a simple external hard drive.
It’s 3Tb, so definitely worth trying to salvage something out of this horrible experience.
Has anyone else done this? If so, is it easy to remove the drive and use it as a basic external USB drive?
Regards,
Mark
Hi,
Not a lot of users have information about this procedures since it will void the warranty.
Have you tried contacting WD Support for direct assitance on your issue?
@psionmark So the loss would be about $80. The 3TB My Cloud I wanted to buy (but not anymore) costs $180. A 3.5" 3TB drive (7200rpm, 64MB buffer) costs $100 on Amazon. And from my recent interaction on this forum, it is likely that this My Cloud uses cheaper 5400rpm drives. So not really good news.
It’s sad you can’t return it for a full refund. Did you buy it on a MasterCard because if you call MCard and explain what’s going on, they can sort something out - as in, product didn’t work as advertised.
It shouldn’t be very difficult to extract the drive from the device.
The white coating is clipped on the grey part, so if you have a flat-headed screwdriver, you can easily remove it by leveraging on it.
Then a few screws to remove and the drive should be in your hands.
The problem is that you will probably lose all your data on it, if you simply put the drive inside an external rack (as it’s linux based and partitionned).
Natasha266 wrote:
@psionmark So the loss would be about $80. The 3TB My Cloud I wanted to buy (but not anymore) costs $180. A 3.5" 3TB drive (7200rpm, 64MB buffer) costs $100 on Amazon. And from my recent interaction on this forum, it is likely that this My Cloud uses cheaper 5400rpm drives.
…
A standalone WD 3TB drive (Red drive) that’s used inside the My Cloud costs $128 on Amazon - so the loss is only $52…much less than $80.
http://www.amazon.com/WD-Red-NAS-Hard-Drive/dp/B008JJLW4M
EDIT: In another thread, I had said the drives are 5400 RPM, but I was wrong. My error. It’s not advertised what the rpm speed of the red drives used inside the My Cloud products are - because the Red drives have proprietary WD drive technology that gives variable rpm speed and not a fixed rpm speed. Little more on Intellipower here → http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3665
Thanks for the info folks.
FYI, the Transporter Sync I ordered arrived today. I plugged in my 1Tb external drive and it works like a dream.
I know it’s not a NAS per se (but sorta is), but it does what I want perfectly, so I may put the 3Tb drive from the WDMC into a drive enclosure and plug that in. Or I may just leave the WDMC as a time machine backup, as I have 2 Macs in the house. It’s slow as **bleep** but gets their eventually.
In the spirit of fairness, I’d like to report that Support has contacted me to try and resolve the issues.
Whilst that is very much appreciated, it shouldn’t be necassary, but hopefully I’ll be able to salvage some use of the drive. After all, it wasn’t cheap.
As I mentioned to support: “I just carried out a very quick and dirty test, transferring a 2.5 Mb photo from my iPhone to the WDMyCloud. It took 16 seconds. The same file sent to the Transporter (plugged into the same router) took 2.5 seconds. I know that’s not scientific, but it reflects my day to day experience with the device.”
I’ll keep you posted of developments - if you’re interested!
BTW, thanks for mentioning about the Transporter product. I’m curious about it. Hadn’t heard of it before but when I checked out their website earlier, after reading your post, it sounded intriguing (and promising). But to be honest despite watching videos for both their Transporter Sync and Transporter products I’m still very puzzled as to how it works…they dumbed down everything so much, which for a techie like me, oddly left me clueless as to how it’s working. I couldn’t really understand from the video for sync device, if the sync connects to a computer at home or to an external drive at home…it was a bit puzzling for me 
@PsionMark Can you run more throughput diagnostics and post them here? I don’t know which software is out there for that (a bit like CrystalDisk but for NAS).
Cybernut1 wrote:
BTW, thanks for mentioning about the Transporter product. I’m curious about it. Hadn’t heard of it before but when I checked out their website earlier, after reading your post, it sounded intriguing (and promising). But to be honest despite watching videos for both their Transporter Sync and Transporter products I’m still very puzzled as to how it works…they dumbed down everything so much, which for a techie like me, oddly left me clueless as to how it’s working. I couldn’t really understand from the video for sync device, if the sync connects to a computer at home or to an external drive at home…it was a bit puzzling for me
They don’t make it obvious, do they?
From what I understand, they come in 2 flavours. The Transporter (the tall one) has either a built-in, supplied hard drive, or you can add your own to an empty enclosure. The Transporter Sync (the small one which I got) has no drive, or even space for one - you add your own external USB hard drive.
Beyond that, I understand they both behave the same way. At least now they do. Until fairly recently, I believe the Sync didn’t have some features of the original Transporter.
Once you’ve set it up (in my case, that involved plugging it in, plugging my USB drive in and letting it get on with the formatting), you install an application on your Mac, Windows, iOS devices etc.
You get two folders on Mac and Windows. In one of them goes all the files you want to sync across all Mac and Windows machines (haven’t checked for Linux). These files are sync’d across all devices connected to your account and also the driver plugged in to the Sync. So this bit behaves much like Dropbox.
The other folder contains files that only exist on the Sync drive. Handy for big video files etc.
The iOS apps can see and download files in either of these folders.
The iOS apps leave something to be desired - very minimal (can’t create a folder, for example) but they are working on it. More importantly, they’ve just released an API into the wild, so good things could follow. Having said that, I can sit in a cafe and access files that only exist on my Sync device back home no problem, so it gets the job done.
Interestingly, I got one fo these to replace my premium Dropbox account. The choice was paying $100 a year for 100Gb, or the same amount of money for as much space as I have on a drive forever.
It’s replaceed Dropbox admirably, but has also pretty much replaced the WDMyCloud, too.
Hope this helps.
Natasha266 wrote:
@PsionMark Can you run more throughput diagnostics and post them here? I don’t know which software is out there for that (a bit like CrystalDisk but for NAS).
To be honest, I really don’t have the time or the inclination.
This is a reflection on the device, not you
I really have spent too much “playing” with this thing trying to get it to work satisfactorily and now it’s time to get some real work done!
I am in contact with support, though, so if anything interesting comes of that, I’ll report back here.
psionmark wrote:
…
Hope this helps.
That certainly helped very much! Thanks for the detailed explanation.
It certainly sounds like what I bought my My Cloud EX2 to do, but does it in a much more user-friendly way. I have hacked my EX2 a lot over the past month (modded the firmware to add various features like sftp, restricting public access of usb drives, logging sftp activity and log rotation of sftp log, etc.) so I have got my device to be about where I’d have liked it to be out of the box. But the friend I share files with on my EX2 is a Mac user and not too tech-savvy and was asking me about my WD NAS. I think I might point her in the direction of the Transporter Sync (or Transporter) instead. Certainly would suit her needs better.
And given that they are still building out its features, I am hopeful the Transporter folks would add some of the features that it currently lacks (like the one you mentioned). I am certainly impressed.
And what you said about the whole dropbox cost versus your own cloud is the exact reason behind the current explosion of personal cloud and NAS solutions market (thanks to cheap huge hard drives and gigabit home networks). Though thanks to Microsoft’s OneDrive, I currently get125 GB free space but after a yearl ong promo ends next year, it will drop down to 25 GB. But I don’t care about the free OneDrive much anymore…I am feeling the same way just as you are - the joy to have my own huge personal cloud storage.
I, too, had quite a tinker, but decided it was about time I should be able to just leave it to get on with things, which it won’t.
The Transporter Sync (TS) is behaving beautifully. On the Mac, you’ve got a permanent alias to the device, so I’ve created a bunch of Hazel rules to move stuff on/off/around the TS. I could never do this with the WD, as the device kept dropping off the netwotk, so another +1 to the TS.
I’ve got a lot of stuff now on the TS. I sync the really important stuff to another external drive on my Mac, which gets backed up off site with Backblaze, so lots of redunancy.
For instance (a bit convoluted, but fun!), I can take a photo on my iPhone. When I get home, CameraSync pushes that to my Box account. I have a Hazel rule which moves it from my Box account to my TS (in a nicely formatted, dated folder structure), which then gets backed up with BackBlaze. And this happens REALLY quickly And I can browse the photos on iOS when I’m out and about.
Oh, did I mention you can select which folders you want to sync on Mac, Windows etc?
Okay, I’m even closer now to being done with this.
Support isn’t really helping. I know they’re trying, but it’s just all the obvious stuff I’ve tried already (fixed IP etc).
To top it all, my Mac’s can’t now see the NAS half the time, so they can’t complete a TimeMachine backup, which is pretty much the nail in the coffin, as I was thinking about just leaving it as a TimeMachine device, but if it can’t even do that…
So, next question, can anyone recommend a good enclosure? Cheap would be good - I want to spend as little as possible given the time and money I’ve already spent.
USB is fine. I’ve got pretty much a NAS with the Transporter, so I’d be reasonably just to have a 3Tb USB drive.
Or maybe I’ll just use it as a door stop…
I feel your pain. Reading all these horrors stories about safepoints and timemachine, I took the easy way out.
Fortunately (for me) the mycloud is working fine but I already lost one safepoint, very painful. It is doing safepoint now but I added an extra usb 3 drive to my setup (3 ways backup). For a week now I have been testing this :
so far it has proved, cheap, speedy and reliable. I just shoved a 3TB SATA 3 drive into it and I do a simple manual mirror of the data. USB 3 to USB 3, I hit 97MB/s (usb3->usb3->1Gig network). It will probably do more as my machine has only SATA 2 drive and USB 2. Also, if your machine can put the drive to sleep, it will also pass that through. So the drive stays cool.
well build, strong, has an off/on switch and an ejection button so you don’t have to pull out the drive manually (saves the pins). It is spring loaded (on the side) so it keeps the drive firmly wedged in.
Maybe others tested some too.
HTH
That StarTech looks nice. Did you just lift the drive out of the WDMyCloud and put it in the StarTech?
psionmark wrote:
That StarTech looks nice. Did you just lift the drive out of the WDMyCloud and put it in the StarTech?
No I did not use the mycloud drive I am afraid. But if it is Sata (I/II/III) then you are good to go. As far i can tell from other drive cases, it is a Sata drive with the motherboard attached to the Sata port. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DEFdA4–Xw
The video is for mybook but I believe the construction is similar; there is only one way to be sure 
Well, I’ve just ordered one of these - I shall let you know how it goes.
Hopefully I’ll be able to salvage something from this experience.
psionmark wrote:
Well, I’ve just ordered one of these - I shall let you know how it goes.
Hopefully I’ll be able to salvage something from this experience.
LOL< even cheaper than mine
I actually bought 2,one is startech and the other http://www.amazon.co.uk/Plugable-Lay-Flat-Docking-Station-ASM1053E/dp/B00D399JU2/ref=sr_1_8?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1398862642&sr=1-8&keywords=usb+3.0+docking+station
the latter one is very good too but unfortuantely it does not work with my router (connect to USB 2.0 port on router) for some reason) so I used this on my PC and the startech connected to my mycloud.
Yeah let us know, as I am thinking of buying a third one. If you can test port usb 2.0 and 3.0 would be great (I dont have usb 3.0 except mycloud to test. When I tested I hit 96 MB/s but depends on contents being transferred). Also, information if the drive stays cool if left on. At the moment. becuase ycloud does nto pub usb drive to sleep, Ionyl switch on when it is time to back up. Saves energy and stays cool=long life.
All we need now is a reliable backup that cost nothing
Quick update:
I’ve attached the 3Tb drive in the enclosure and it’s working beautifully as a USB drive on and old MacBook Pro as a time machine and media storage device.
For anyone interested, here’s what it looks like when stripped!
It actually seems to be a really good drive, just wrapped up in a not-very-good fashion as a WDMyCloud.
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