I have a Windows 7 laptop with 100s of GBs of data that I decided I should finally back up. I just bought the 3 TB WD My Cloud model, hooked it up to my wireless network, configured it (not very intuitive), and finally got it so I could at least drag-and-drop folders and files into my “share” on the drive. At that point I hooked it up to a wired router with Ethernet cables so I could transfer large amounts of data faster as recommended by a sheet inside the package. By the way, the documentation in the package is virtually non-existent (1 large sheet of icons and arrows with some URLs).
No matter how I tried, my Windows desktop (Windows Explorer) eventually started restarting at the slightest prod. For example, when I first installed the software on my laptop, I moved the installed icons to where I wanted them on my desktop and then right-clicked (wanted to select “Refresh” to save their locations) and Windows Explorer IMMEADIATELY restarted. I finally got it to stop doing that and eventually got the icons to where I wanted and refreshed, but it took a lot of doing. I really do not know how an average consumer could possibly get this product to work; I have a Computer Science degree and have been able to do anything needed with my family’s Windows PCs and laptops for nearly three decades.
After hooking up the drive with an Ethernet cable to a wired router, I dragged-and-dropped all the folders in my Documents folder onto my “share” on the My Cloud drive and everything started to copy. Right off I noticed it was extremely slow copying individual small files (0-64 KB) at about 1 per second (I had 20K files to copy); however, when it came to some multi-GB files I had, it was tearing through them at about 10 Mbytes/second over a 100 Mbps connection for about 80% network utilization. However, while watching the megabytes count off, I noticed the file transfer stopped at 999 MB for 25 seconds, then continued for the next almost 1 GB, then paused for another 25 seconds, etc, and kept doing this until between 9-10 GBytes of total data transferred (not just a single file). I have inserted a screen capture of the network utilization chart produced by Task Manager that shows the behavior, if WD is interested. By the way, the narrow gap just past the middle is the end of one multi-GB file and the start of the next multi-GB file.
After the about 8-10 GBytes total copying, my desktop Windows Explorer started restarting again and then different system processes spat out windows with errors that had killed them, etc. Eventually, without exception (I tried this four times), I received the “blue screen of death” (BSOD).
At this point, I am ready to return this product to Best Buy. I have 260 GB of laptop data to back up and my wife has probably double that on her desktop, and it is very apparent we will not be able to get this to work. The My Cloud drive itself seems to work, excepting the 25-second pauses (I think it is copying data to RAM and then writing the 1 GB of data to disk during the 25 seconds because I can hear the drive seeking), the near constant Windows Explorer restarts, and the horrific BSOD every 8-10 GBytes of data.
Since dragging multiple folders onto a “share” on the WD My Cloud results in the drive first creating every folder and sub-folders BEFORE copying any data files, I cannot tell where the file copying died, and I am not going to open 260 folders in a hierarchy to figure it out and then try to copy individual files and folders to try to get it to work. I have not got that kind of time.
Has anyone else had trouble like this?
