My Book Live is terrible. I wish I had done more research before I bought it. I would not recommend this product to anybody. I am forever having to restart it to get it recognised by any of my computers. It also makes a very loud and unhealthy noise when it does actually operate. If I try to stream a movie or TV show on my home network, it runs slow and is forever pausing. A quick internet search shows that many, many other people have the same or very similar problems. The only way I can fix any of these problems is by periodically delving very deep into the back end of the MBL’s software and deleting some log files. I only worked this out after some very extensive internet searches and it is not easy however I also would not recommend it to most users. I wish I could get my money back to buy something that actually worked. I won’t be buying any WD products in the future.
I would like to ask you a few things. What is the maker and model of your router? Is your computer connecting to the router via a wireless connection or wired?
G’day Iluna.
My router is a Netcomm Wireless N300. My MBL is connected by LAN cable and my computers are connected wirelessly. The ever present problem occurs even when I have full internet access and access to other devices on the network, so I can’t see it being a network issue. I have tried connecting my computer to the network with a LAN cable with absolutely no difference. Even with no other major traffic passing through the router, the problem persists.
One of the problems lies with the mediacrawler running non-stop and never letting the hard disks rest. Well, that fixes the constant disk spinning anyway and some of the poor read speeds. I normally go through and delete some of the excessively large log files as this also improves speed. As for the constantly dropping connection, I have not even found a band-aid fix for that. All I can do some times is access the MBL dashboard and tell it to restart or to physically unplug the power to force a restart.
All of the above things should not need to be done for a household network drive. A quick google search will show you I am not the only one with any of these problems, it seems there are many who do. I really would like to be proven wrong, but I have spent many hours searching for and trying fixes, but without any real success.
Disable Media and Mio Crawlers and that will help tremendously with the speed. Many say that doing that will void the warrantee. But who cares when you ill then have a useable drive. Don’t know why WD doesn’t give user the option to turn it off when they know it cause people so many problems!
SSH into the drive and:
/etc/init.d/orion stop - Stops mediacrawler and Miocrawler
To completely stop orion from restarting:
update-rc.d -f orion remove
You should see the following message
Removing any system startup links for /etc/init.d/orion …
/etc/rc0.d/K05orion
/etc/rc2.d/S86orion
/etc/rc3.d/K05orion
/etc/rc4.d/K05orion
/etc/rc6.d/K05orion
To kill the existing processes (without needing to restart)
/etc/init.d/orion stop
If you wanna put it back some other time, just add it back using the update-rc.d command
update-rc.d orion defaults; /etc/init.d/orion start
Cheers Abner055. I haven’t come across this fix before. I’ll give it a crack and see what happens. I’m not afraid of voiding the warranty because WD already supplied me a non-functioning product. It’ll just put me and them even as I see it.
Any ideas on how to keep the thing from dropping off the network all the time?
On a related note, the first suggested topic at the bottom of the page for me at the moment is “Bad Warranty Service - who can I contact?” ha ha ha. That’s what you really want to see isn’t it…
No, don’t know about your network problem. Can be many things specially wireless. I’ve never had those problems. But i mostly access wired. Only occasionally access wireless from iPads and that has always worked fine.
