One drive shows failed after 5.13.115 firmware upgrade

3 month old 3 TB WD Red drive. Upgrade happened at 3:43am, at 6:30am the drive one shows failed. Any ideas? This is the second drive in 3 months so maybe WD is not building quality NAS drives anymore. The first drive I installed would make a grinding noise every 30 seconds although SMART and scan showed it fine. I sent that drive back and the new one worked fine for 3 months but now the system is showing that drive as failed.

Try reset the device, that helped mi once when it showed bad drive

Thanks for your help. I did go through the reset process. It appears the drive is bad. 2nd RED drive in 3 months. Makes a weird scrapping sound and shuts down. Drive location one, again. There is no way the WDcloud ex2 ultra is damaging the drive is there?

While the “sleep” and “indexing” issues of OS5 will eventually wear out a Red drive. . . .this sounds like it is happening too soon.

Second the motion for a HARD PASS on WD Red drives. They ain’t what they used to be - they are now using SMR technology. . . .which offers some meager advantages to the manufacturer at the expense of performance (and durability?) for the user. Last I checked. . .they didn’t save you any money versus conventional CMR technology.

In the WD line. . .go for the 5400 RPM “Red Plus” drives or the 7200 RPM “Red Pro” drives. For most people, the Red Plus is perfectly fine.

I agree to avoid these drives with lesson learned at this point. I bought an Iron Wolf 4tb yesterday and will not even return the WD RED on RMA. I have read several people’s accounts that their RMA return resulted in a refurbed drive that failed almost as quickly. As long as the Seagate drive doesn’t start the godawful noise the last two WD Reds have made before dying.

Unfortunately; consumer trends is an aggregate thing.

To WD:
A drive sold and not returned = successful sale
A drive RMA’d = Unsuccessful sale

Get enough RMA’s - - - they may start to realize they have a problem.

I get it - - -I Have forgone RMA once or twice. I have also RMA’d defective products a bunch of times.

In a few cases; the RMA experience has been easy-peasy and customer service superb. I reward those companies with further business. In one case; I bought a replacement while waiting for a 2 week turnaround RMA - - - now I have two and am pleased.

In other cases. . .where the RMA is unpleasant. . . I shun the company.

FURTHER - - - while WD does not have much presence on this forum. . .I suspect they do peek in here.

  • I wouldn’t be surprised if they see the recent downturn in the number of complaints regarding OS/5 as indications of improvement. (as opposed to more people giving up)

  • ALTHOUGH - - I suspect that there are some shills in the mix here as well. More so now than in the past.

if you have the means to take the drive out, and directly connect to a PC you might be able to run diagnostics on it.

assuming the drive suddenly failed by coincidence with a firmware update … idk, i am skeptical.

if it indeed failed, looks like you’re within warranty for a replacement. but if something in the firmware resulted in the failure – IF – i would likely have some bone to pick with WD. this is your data you’re talking about, it’s not someone else’s playground to kick sand around into your face like that.

i often see the update chimes in the dashboard but my approach is: if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.

i paid a decent chunk of money to set myself up and build up redundancy and 2 duplicates of my source data so i really don’t care what WD thinks is hot at the moment and must be installed on my NAS right now, if there is ANY possibility whatsoever that the update will brick me somehow.

and i think manufacturers should be held liable for damages they cause to customers.

Twice now mine has shown some type of failure on one of the drives, I compare the stats to the good drive and it looks fine. I reboot and the alert seems to clear. Hope that helps

Thank you for everyones replay. I am going to file an RMA. I really do love the Mycloud EX2 Ultra because it is very much step above the original Mycloud I had. The drive issues are a speed bump and I do plan to hook my failing drive to my linux box to see what it diagnoses. The funny thing is the first drive that failed made the weird screeching noise but Smartdrive showed no issues. However, hooking it up to my linux box it would never finish the drive troubleshooting since it kept throwing errors. The second drive produced even louder screeching noises in the WDCloud and then shut down. I guess it was due to drawing too much current.

Filed my RMA today. Quick and easy process especially when the drive is registered. The other nice thing is that the shipment is only 5 bucks UPS ground. A discount offered by WD to send the drive back. Will be interesting what they send back. I plugged it into my Linux box and it continued the scraping noise and quickly stopped rotating because I guess it was pulling too much current. Lets see what WD finds.