My cloud won't sleep

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
14

[Brilliant contributor named “Banned”](/wstd/board/message “Brilliant contributor nemed “Banned””) provided a solution for the WD My Book Live (MBL) to stop the endless 24x7 thrashing of the disk drive and to allow the MBL to enter SLEEP mode. Here is Banned’s solution adapted to the WD My Cloud.

A lot of people, myself included, just want to use the My Cloud as a Network-Accesible Server (NAS) for back-ups on the local area network, and are not interested in Remote Access over the internet. We just want the My Cloud to show up as a drive letter in Windows Explorer (such as W) or a network drive name (such as \WDMYCLOUD\sharename) so that backup software running on computers connected to the LAN will have a shared place to back up their files. The standard configuration of My Cloud allows you to do this, but 99+% of disk activity is indexing the drive content for Remote Access over the internet. If you don’t want Remote Access, you are paying a huge price in performance, energy consumption, and drive life for this feature that you are not using.

So here is the variation on Banned’s excellent method to end disk thrashing adapted for the WD My Cloud. Remember, be VERY careful, as every keystroke counts and a mistake can lead to bigger problems.

  1. Read Banned’s solution for the WD My Book Live (see link above).

  2. Access your My Cloud via SSH as per Banned’s directions (it’s easier than you think).

  3. From SSH, disable the processes that are thrashing the disk drive 24x7:

    cd /usr/local/wdmcserver/bin

    chmod 644 wdmcserver
    chmod 644 wdphotodbmerger
    chmod 644 convert

  1. Open your local My Cloud admin web page ( http://192.168.x.y/UI/ where 192.168.x.y is the local IP address of your My Cloud)

  2. Reboot the My Cloud - Home | Utilities | Device Maintenance | Reboot

  3. Reboot takes a long time, so don’t touch anything until it completes.

  4. When the reboot is complete, wait about 5 minutes with NOTHING accessing the My Cloud.

  5. Now listen carefully and put your hand on the My Cloud, and the disk thrashing should be a thing of the past.

  6. To RE-ENABLE the processes that are thrashing the disk drive 24x7 because you want Remote Access, go to SSH:

    cd /usr/local/wdmcserver/bin

    chmod 755 wdmcserver
    chmod 755 wdphotodbmerger
    chmod 755 convert

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