Is constant disk activity normal?

I have a new 4GB My Cloud that was set up yesterday (with help from some kind folks on this forum). It seems to be working ok but I can hear constant disk activity coming from the device–never seems to stop, at least whille I’m at my desk next to it. Is this normal? 

If you have uploaded a lot of files (especially music or pictures) the My Cloud is scanning the files. Let the My Cloud settle down for a day or so and activity should return to normal.

A lot of the activity also depends on how you have setup the shares and overall My Cloud.

I have the same problem by a new MyCloud (3GB). There is constant disk activity for 3 days. I think this is not normal. Is your disk now stopped?

Reply to: Jimtowner and BertV

Open up the Dashboard and look at Settings>General>Energy Saver and see if Drive Sleep is ON. See image below.

WDMyCloudSleep.JPG

Posted by,
cat0w (USA)

Thanks voor your reaction. I have checked and Drive Sleep is ON. 

The following can be found in the Dashboard under Help.

Turning On/Off Sleep Mode

To minimize energy consumption, you can control whether the hard drive will go to sleep after it has been inactive for 10 minutes.

To set whether the drive goes to sleep:

  1. Click Settings.
  2. In the left pane, click General.
  3. Turn Drive Sleep on or off as appropriate:
  • On: The hard drive goes to sleep during inactive periods.
  • Off: The hard drive never goes into sleep mode.

Posted by,
cat0w (USA)

Something seems to be preventing your drive from going inactive, so there must be some process that is continuing to access the disk.

I would go through each of the main services and experiment by disabling them, one by one, and see if that allows the drive to sleep.

The likely services are:

i) Media streaming

ii) iTunes Server

iii) Apple TimeMachine

The default setup of the Twonky server is to permanently rescan files, looking for media changes.  I’m not sure if this prevents the drive from sleeping, but when I used the Twonky UI to set a rescan interval on 1440 minutes (one day), I noticed that my drive would sleep, but that may have been coincidental to other changes I made.

Another possibility is that you have a lot of media files that need thumbnails creating.  I’m not sure when thumbnails are created…

If stopping these services doesn’t allow the drive to sleep, then I would try a reboot, and then a system only restore.  Essentially, the primary IT support question: ‘have you tried turning it off and on again?’

If stopping a service allows the drive to sleep, re-activate the service.  Cycling the media streaming certainly stops and restarts the Twonky service, so, if it has got confused, it may resolve incorrect behaviour.

After 3 days the thing is still clicking away. I cahnged these setting and it made no difference:

There are:

  • 58 Music Tracks
  • Pictures: 19466
  • Videos: 129

Turned these settings off and it made no difference:

  • Media Streaming: OFF
  • iTunes Server: OFF
  • Nothing else is listed in Media.

Set to sleep but no sleep is occuring.

I have no idea what a Twonky server is so I can’t do anything whith that information

Did a reboot and it made no difference.

WHAT DOES SYSTEM ONLY RESTORE DO? I don’t want to loose any data and have to start again.

A miracle. The box has quited down after about a half hour of doing the things I listed, I suppose I can trun on some of the media services if I need them but I don’t right now.

Thanks for the help and for making a quiet workspace.

Glad to hear you have some peace…  Let’s hope it was something to do with the settings changes…

Twonky is the tool that does the media serving, and has created that list of discovered media.  You can get to its control panel by entering <your mycloud’s IP>:9000 into your browser’s address pane.

System only restore will not delete any data.  Normally…  But note WD’s recommendation to do a backup first.  I’ve not had a problem, but I’ll bet others have lost data.

There are two worthless services thumbnailing/indexing files.  SSH in and disable them.

FYI.  If you turn on DLNA and leave a DLNA client listing a dir on your mycloud, the device will never sleep.