MyCloud/MyBook life expectancy and/or maintenance

Over time I’ve bought 4 MyBook and MyCloud drives.  

None of them lasted more than 2 years before either slowing down to a crawl or altogether dying.  At current prices it would have been cheaper if I simply purchased online storage, which would also give me fault tolerance.  If these are failures, that it happened to all 4 of the drives seems to me like a design flaw more than just “bad luck”.  

But this seems wrong, even impossible, for WD to make such a bad product so maybe I am missing something.    The questions below might help me figure out what is going on and/or how to cope with it:

  1. Is there some sort of maintenance I should be doing on the drives?  Maybe something like defragging or even routine reformat of the whole drive?
  2. Is there a way to do a complete wipe and restore back to the state it was when purchased?
  3. If the drives are truly going bad, is there a way to replace the hard drive inside the MyBook/MyCloud and rebuild it back to factory default?
  1. None that I’m aware of – I have two My Book Lives, two My Book Live Duos, a My Cloud, a My Cloud EX4, and a My Cloud DL4100 – not a one of them has failed or slowed down.

  2. Sort of – you can do a FULL RESTORE, which will return it to factory configuration and also do an All-Zero’s wipe of the data partition.  But it doesn’t return the firmware to out-of-box condition – whatever version is on there stays on there.

  3. Yes, but it voids the warranty – you have to open the case to get the drive out.

Thank you Tony,

  1. Are there instructions on the web and/or a document on how to do the full restore?  Also, once you mentioned it I tried to go looking for the option in the dashboard… only to find that the dashboard my MyCloud isn’t opening.  Is there a way to trigger it without going throught he dashboard?

  2. Not worried about voiding the warranty as I moved out of the country and it would cost me more to ship than to buy a replacement unit.  Where would I find instructions (and probably necessary software) to “prime” the new drive so that it will function on my MyBook and MyCloud units?

  1. http://community.wd.com/t5/WD-My-Cloud/Rebuild-your-My-Cloud-or-upgrade-the-HDD-on-it/td-p/675109

BrunoGenovese wrote:

  1. Are there instructions on the web and/or a document on how to do the full restore? 

It’s all in the manual…