Is My Cloud Home, the worst NAS of all time?

  • Yes, My Cloud Home is the worst NAS of all time and I regret buying it
  • No, I really love My Cloud Home and I would buy more of such dumb devices
0 voters

These are some ideas which would make the experience with MCH better:

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As of now, more than 88% of the people who bought MCH device are unsatisfied with it.
Of Course sample size is not large enough but this shows a worrying trend for WD investors

I’m not sure that the question is accurate!

Google Search - "Is the WD My Cloud Home a NAS? "

“The My Cloud Home plugs into your router and is accessible not only to all the devices on your home network, but also over the Internet. It is a not a standard network-attached storage ( NAS ) device, and might not behave as you expect.”

Just thought I’d mention it, I wouldn’t want the WD investors upset.

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as for me I bought a house in the area where I couldn’t connect to cloud


It’s the biggest pile of ■■■■ I’ve ever purchased, the Plex server has been broken for over a month

WD welcomes you back to 1995 - a time when nothing played-well, out of the box, with Windows.

To the time of writing, the WD MyCloud EX2 Ultra has been installed for about 12-hours and already I’ve spent at least 60% of that time trawling the ‘Search’ engines and this forum for solutions to myriad issues which have impeded access either to my networked folders or the NAS box itself.

It really shouldn’t be this problematic, in 2021, for WD to produce a box designed as an NAS solution that actually functions without requiring the customer to engage in an extensive hoop-jumping regime.

As I said, above, this sort of dodgy functionality belongs in 1995.

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I share this opinion. It is a ridiculous piece of junk which is worse than a simple USB memory. Life is faster with a USB Ext HDD than this stupid My Cloud Home
 i beat myself for not reading the comments before buying it. If there is ever an opportunity to get my money back - i would gladly chose that than living with what i have bought. Seriously
such a sham for a Network Drive.

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is gewoon troep heb nog nooit zoveel problemen gehad met deze zooi oude was beter maar werkt niet meer

Hey guys!

I was wondering if anyone knows about any custom firmware to make the device usable?
Found this How to hack the "WD My Cloud Home Duo" into a decent home media center · GitHub but mine isnt duo, and I don’t know if it will work


I actually want to:

  1. Configure SMB Users and shares
  2. Configure the device with Static IP
  3. If possible disable that file sharing over the internet security hole.

All comments are welcomed!
Thanks :wink:

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It hasn’t been the easiest to set up, that’s for sure. But it works well for my family to just sign in and see their files that they need. The system does look nice though.

#WDUserRewards

I bought one to begin with for doing local backups and it kinda worked, first issue was that its drive letter would change randomly now and then, but at least most of the time it got the same letter assigned on every windows restart.

I got another drive like it to use as a shared storage, now problems really kicked in, because the two drives with obtain each their random drive letter when windows would boot, rendering the drives completely useless when they needed to be accessed by software running on a connected device.

I set up static IPs for them in my ISR as that was the solution WD support gave me, they said that drive letters were assigned corresponding to IP address
which turned out to be a lie, they still obtain whatever random letter they please.

So I decided to manually set them up for connection in windows, by navigating to the drives ip in the explorer address bar, then right click the “public” folder on the drive and select “map network drive”.

That worked, BUT the annoying WD app still connects them too and that means ive got them connected twice
yeah uninstall WD app would sove that right
guess what, I uninstalled it and now the drives wouldnt connect at all. /meh

On top of that, one of the drives consistently shows up as empty when I navigate to it by its ip address, despite there are indeed files on it.

The other one only shows me the private files and not the public ones, no matter what I do with it.

Bottom line, those drives are complete, utterly S*** in every possible way, with one exception, if you only have ONE small laptop and ONE homecloud drive, where you manually adminster files on the drive
and then it begs the question, why not just get a normal USB connected external drive instead?

Had i known those drives were such c***, Id have spent the few xtra bucks and got a NAS instead, because even though that would be twice the cost, it would be more than justified by the fact, that I wouldnt have had to waste an enormous amount of man hours on making the WD drives (somewhat) work.

All I want is, a drive that connects to the network, which I can assign on any computer with any drive letter I want, thats it, really THAT simple, yet WD had to make it overly complicated by adding a public and a private area to it so the user wont be able to access half of his contents.

WD proved very well, that they dont give f*** by lettiing these issues go on and on and on for years, no try to fix it at all at any point.

Support gave me a “solution” that doesnt work and the other issue I had with not being able to acccess my own files on my own drive, they had no idea how to solve
except ofcourse “try and initialize
” fu WD, because that means im gonna spend a load of hours backing up the drive, initializing it and most likely just see that it didnt fix it and then youll tell me to take it to the shop where I bought it and
pfffffff

NO NO NO!! WD your s*** doesnt work, FIX it!

MCH was not advertised as a backup device but rather a personal cloud. A cheap USB HDD is a local backup device. As a personal cloud, it worked reasonably well and was cheap storage.

This is how Windows network share drive has always been assigned - not randomly but from starting from Z: back from a first come basis.
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/windows/en-US/ed1797e6-fba5-46e5-8523-293d3d9e2450/reserve-drive-letters-for-network-shares

Most of your complaints are dated and have been corrected. The new MCH firmware (8.13.1-102 as of this writing) has made the MCH a Linux Debian Samba SMB3_11 device instead of the abominable Android based pseudo-Samba KDDFS hybrid filesystem that it was.

Cheers.

Unfortunately it doesnt seem corrected on my drives, despite they have always been up to date on newest firmware.

  1. I can still not assign any driveletter to them I would want
at least not in any way I can find or figure out?

  2. I still got one of the drives consistently showing up as empty when I enter its ip address in windows explorer, the other drive however shows its files when using that method.

  3. My drives still appear as two different drives each, with two different sets of files and that I cant find any way to change either.

As I said, what I want (and need) is just two drives, hooked up to my switch, that I can access and map, thru their IP address on any computer on my network
pretty much how a normal NAS works
or any other share I might set up in windows.

But if someone could tell me exactly what the steps are to achieve what im asking for, id be very delighted, because after all, Id like to spare both the time and money of getting a Synology NAS instead.

Im aware of that its not a “standard” type of NAS, but it still is a NAS as its plain storage and its network attached.

It seems they took the standard NAS and tried to make it more userfriendly to laymen, however they just made it worse by that.

It has some weird two layer storage where u can see some of it from your computers file explorer and the other part can be viewed thru a webbrowser where u log in to you WD account.

So many ppl are super confused about that and I dont blame them.

WDs remark there about it may not work the way youd expect it to, just like when christians explains bad stuff with “the lord works in mysterious ways”, its a load of bc and a poor excuse for delivering some halfbaked product. :-/

Another couple of reasons just came up to why I dont like the My Cloud Home.

I was out for a short trail with the family today, shot some video and pics with the drone, transferred the whole thing to my phone and did a fast edit with GoPro Quik.

Then Id like to save all the raw material somewhere else as the vid is 4K and takes up a lot of space on my phones internal memory, so lets use the fantastic MyCloud solution right?

Opened the app, selected the album I made for the footage, then chose to upload files and selected all 42 files I wanted to upload.

It made it half way thru before it got stuck for over an hour until I cancelled the transfer and restarted, it still didnt work, so I tried just a single file
didnt work either. Grrrr

I did the transfer whole being at home connected to my network thru the WiFi6 connection I run here, so network wasnt the problem.

However, the files it did manage to transfer I tried tapping on them to view them and got the message “file isnt supported”, WTF??? Its a normal video file from my DJi Air 2s, those files runs on my phone, my computer and what not, but I have to download them from my personal cloud storage to view them
I might as well subscribe to any cold storage online (where fileupload actually works).

The more I try to make good use of the MyCloud Home, the more issues turns up in my face that makes it completely useless.

The way im able to make use of those two drives is only like any USB drive that would come at a fraction of the cost.

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These are all simple problems with simple solutions. I’d suggest reading the forum and knowledgebase a tad more and it will all be readily apparent.

Enable local access with the new Firmware 8.12 and above. See link at the bottom of this reply.

Dated information with the legacy file system. To see everything with the new SMB - Enable local access with the new Firmware 8.12 and above. See link at the very bottom of this post.

This is often due to the mobile app being throttled by the mobile OS’s battery optimization during a long transfer. Restart the WD My Cloud Home app by killing it in the tasks and restart it and exclude the WD app from battery optimization. If that doesn’t work, just use another free File manager such as the Android “File Manager +” and use that locally to transfer the files directly and locally and keep the app running for the duration.

My Cloud Home Firmware 8.12.0-178 Release Notes

Version: 8.12.0-178

Release Date: 11/14/2022

Supported Devices: My Cloud Home, My Cloud Home Duo, ibi

Description

This update introduces a new ‘local access feature’ to My Cloud Home, My Cloud Home Duo, and ibi products. This will enable users to use their device in a local network without connecting to the internet once local access is enabled using the dashboard. The Dashboard is a browser interface to enable local access. You can launch the dashboard from the web applications (https://home.mycloud.com/) and (https://ibi.sandisk.com/).

To learn more about local network access, please visit our support article.

This is clearly a clickbait titled post and the OP has done nothing constructive to answer the pros and cons, but if one were to play along this line, the worst NAS like storage from a major manufacturer has to be the Seagate DockStar device which was so bad that Seagate bricked it so that no one can use it for anything only a few short years later. Looking at the features at the time, one would conclude where Western Digital Technologies got the idea from which competitor and came out with the My Cloud Home only about two years later. To its credit, WDT managed to update the firmware over 5 years so far which is more than a lot of tech firms can say about their products.

In the end however, one has to wonder which company is more aware of watching the bottom line on devices that are clearly not very profitable - one company that pulled out very early or one that stayed in for more than five years and is now beginning to realize that the duopoly of desktop behemoths is dictating that users use iCloud or One Drive and that personal cloud storage hardware is probably going away soon and that the monthly cloud storage subscription model is the most profitable of all.

Seagate FreeAgent DockStar Network Adapter STDSA10G-RK (White)

  • File sharing at its simplest with a clean, web-based interface.
  • Access files from any networked PC or Mac computer in your home.
  • After service activation, access and share files with friends, over the internet no special software required.
  • Enables friends to upload content as well, creating a comprehensive share space.
  • Appears as a local drive whether in the home or accessed through the internet, for simple drag-and-drop access.
  • Includes Pogoplug Internet file sharing service - no subscription or additional fees required.

https://imgur.com/lcauWm1

Yeah I read that a short while ago and its only several years overdue.

After struggling with these drives for years, ive come to a much simpler solution which is working and has been working perfectly for over a decade, its called Synology NAS. :wink:

Ordered a 2 bay one with a 3TB drive to replace my two WD HomeCloud 1+2TB and it costs no more than those two WD drives combined.

Now on the personal level, thank you very very much for taking the time to respond with the fixes, its much appreciated indeed, I just wish those fixes had been implemented much sooner though. :slight_smile:

Only option for mobile app users is to upload pictures and videos.

  • no pdf’s
  • no documents
  • no music files
  • etc.

No way for mobile users to download files for backup.
However, can use SMB on local network to do these functions, but I have an NAS for that. Basically useless for mobile users other than photo storage, and cannot backup those files for safety. Even device administrator/owner cannot backup user account files, unless on shared folder.

Am I missing something?

Yeah, I regret buying it. I bought it to replace an older, MyBookWorld device. But that was way easier to configure and use. Now, I can’t even connect to one of my shares in the MyCloudHome, which rather defeats the usefulness of the device.

I’ll now be shopping for a proper NAS device for my home.