Just frustrates the poop out of me that WD can’t fix the fan controls. How easy it would be!
Bought some machine screws and nuts and mounted the infinity fan. Hokey
but works.
not sure if you’re monitoring this thread … but i decided to implement your method, utilizing my the correct file “BVBZ…” for my application (EX2 Ultra), the only thing i did not do verbatim to your steps is that I created a new folder in Public and placed the 2 files inside that.
also using the same temperatures you are in your example.
my EX2 only has 1 drive installed.
getting the drive up to around 42-44C, the fan still registers 0 RPM in the diagnostics panel.
not sure if the temperatures that trigger the fan are some other temperature than the drive’s; which is displayed in diagnostics panel ?
I confirmed that the fan indeed works, by using the fan_control command from the earlier post.
i am wondering if something might have changed since 2017, where there may be other settings in another file that control when the fan spins up, or the procedure for doing this is now different than it was back then ?
update:
i saw fan activity in the diagnostic panel when i tried loading the drive with file operations for about an hour (streaming 7-8 videos, doing backups, etc.).
does not look like the info displayed in the diagnostic panel updates too frequently … so i didn’t see an accurate picture of how the fan was running.
since i keep the unit inside a furniture enclosure, was not apparent when it did spin up.
conclusion is that fan is coming on sooner or at least it is coming on around the 43-44C mark for drive temp.
thanks for all the detailed info on how to do this !
For thos here struggling with excessive fan noise and high NAS temps in their EX2 or EX2 Ultra, I added a simple 4 inch fan from Amazon ($10) that is USB powered from the back of the NAS and it DRASTICALLY helped to reduce the internal heat. My internal NAS fan now doesnt turn on after 30 nins whne the NAS used to reach 60 deg C !!! and never come down and the NAS fan made it sound like a jet was flying by!!!
EVen with the USB fan on medium speed the NAS fan doesnt turn on unless I switch the external USB fan off. Its a game changed. The NAS fan would kick on at about 55 deg C which to me is way too late.
I recently upgraded the hDDs in my MyCloud EX2 Ultra from the stock 2 TB drives to two 10 TB drives but I didnt realize the change would mean the whole NAS would run MUCH hotter and cause the fan to be on constantly and NOISY (whereas the stock drives were very quiet and fan barely needed to come on under normal loads)
You can use any USB fan but the one I got and is working great for me is the one on Amazon. Search for
" AC Infinity MULTIFAN S1, Quiet 80mm USB Fan for Receiver DVR Playstation Xbox Computer Cabinet Cooling "
Hope this helps
I’ve been struggling with high temps in my EX2 Ultra as well. I’ve bought it about three years ago, replaced the original 2Tb 5400RPM disks with 8Tb 7200RPM drives and everything ran fine for a long time. A few months ago I started getting temp alerts, with the hard drives reaching 60C/140F. At least twice the unit has shutdown. In one of them, I’ve lost my iSCSI targets. Had to restore the files. As kinglerxt, I’ve placed a small fan on top of the NAS. It has helped to reduce the temperature, but only for some time. And I started getting the alert emails again. As a last resort, I was about to remove the plastic cover to allow a better air flow. And then I realized… This model is poorly designed. The fan is installed vertically at the front of the NAS, right behind the plastic cover. But the only open parts are top and bottom. So the only possible air flow is from bottom to top, behind the fan !!! Just please don’t ask me why the fan was placed vertically. It doesn’t make any sense to me. And because the rubber “feet” broke free, it was seating directly on the table. So there could be no air flow at all. I then glued the rubber feet again, and placed it in a way the bottom center is about an inch from the table. And, believe it or not, problem solved. Disks now run at 50C-52C, even with internal fan at 6K RPM … If you’re dealing with temp issues, try to “raise” your EX2 so the bottom center gets about an inch from the surface, allowing a better air flow. If it’s not enough, try also placing an USB fan on top of the NAS. Might work with the fan under the NAS as well. Hope it helps.
Hi Clarkson,
Did you try the program with the new Cloud OS 5?
Same question about OS5.
But in the end got tired of waiting, seeing my 2 x drives in the red at 55C constantly even when idle… So bought a £10.00 8cm Infinity fan, like most of us here, works a treat: dropped 16 degrees in 10 minutes…
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Search Amazon - “AC Infinity MULTIFAN S1, Quiet 80mm USB Fan, UL-Certified for Receiver DVR Playstation Xbox Computer Cabinet Cooling”
Yup thats what I did back in July. never have any issues now and internal fans never need to come on. Temps used to be scary and LOUD fan spinning all the time.Just hook it up to a USB port on the back of the MyCloud. Problem solved and will help your drives last longer. Whats cool (no pun intended) is that you can change the fan speed so in the summer put it to max to keep cooloer and in the winter when its colder inside you can put it on medium.
If I try on low then internal fans still kick in.
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I bought my MyCloud EX2 in 2018 and one of the drives died recently. My experience with hard drives go back a long way, as I’ve been in IT since around 2007 and I’ve hardly ever seen one die that was less than 7 or 8 years old. And by “bad” I mean that the S.M.A.R.T output said Bad. Mine came with 2 2TB WD Red drives. Since I wanted some more space anyway I went ahead and purchased 2 4 TB drives and am in the process of copying everything back over right now.
Looking into possible causes though, my only thought was temperature, since it has been in the same location undisturbed for 3 years. Both drives seem to stay around 43-45 C which may be acceptable to WD but is not to me. I’ve gone ahead and purchased a fan to put on top, but it’s just kind of surprising to me that this thread goes back to 2014 and there’s still no way to adjust the thermal limits.
I’ve played around with the fan_control command but there’s something else monitoring the temp and lowers the fan speed after using it, so I would have to look around and find what it doing that. I found some xml files in /etc/wd that monitor CPU but not sure if those do the HD temps too, I’ll check a bit later.
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Hello,
I also own the EX2 Ultra and while it was still under warranty an RMA was arranged for it after what seemed constantly high fan speeds but still high heat and other issues with its operation. not even a year after my warranty expired, my EX2 Ultra showed a fan malfunction warning.
So it would seem that a whole lot of people are experiencing fan issues with the EX2 Ultra’s fan and /or fan control software and WD has failed to take any measures to fix what would seem to be a potentially catastrophic design flaw in this product after years of customer complaints. In some cases, users of this product have given up and simply purchased a third party fan and installed it atop their NAS.
Would you say the above is a fair statement?
If so then you will agree that the design of the WD EX2 Ultra NAS does not conform to a reasonable expectation of product performance.
I have extensive links and screenshots of similar threads to the above all over the web. WD can not be unaware of this issue.
If this company refuses to fix this manufacturer defect then I think there are clear grounds for a class action lawsuit against WD.
Meh, the only people who get anything out of a class action lawsuit are the lawyers. We (who get pennies) end up losing even more, as the manufacturer increases prices to pay the lawyers for their lion’s share of the settlement!
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I know its like 6 years later LOL, but I’ve had my ex2 ultra for about a year now, and up until lately I noticed the fan was REALLY loud. I get up at 4:30am and the whole apartment is quiet except for the noise of the fan . I never noticed it before , so to counter this I set a power schedule to turn off the unit from like 11pm-8am, since I never use the NAS between those hours. But then during the day I would start to notice the noise more often and it was bothering me. I finally bumped into this thread , saw your post and ordered the fan. The result is INSANSE!!! I have 2 WD RED PRO drives…and while doing NOTHING…the temps were in the 50c’s and the fan was running 6-8,000 rpm!! ALL THE TIME!..but now? with the Infinity 80mm fan on top…drive 1 is 32c and drive 2 is 38c…and the internal fan is 0 RPM. NO NOISE, plus the Ininity fan is super quiet even on HIGH. So in short… THANK YOU!!! you saved my sanity!!! ( 6 years later!! lol)
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This Fan issue is just silly, especially for now in 2021!
The firmware should NOT decide for us what temperature to turn the fan on.
Not all drives are the same and some like to run cool.
So an option to set the temperature LOWER than the default (but not higher) would be a good optoin.
However, I don’t even know if the fan is even working on this new box I just bought.
When I run System Diags, for the FAN it shows a red exclamation point!
In the Logs, however, the fan is not mentioned. So perhaps that’s a good thing,
At any rate, I put a little 2" fan on top, which is very quiet and throws enough air to keep the unit cool all the time.
I wish that Western Digital would produce a much more stable and NEW device.
Not keep selling a (what is it now? 10 years old or something??) device.
I used a usb fan from eBay plugged in and left on bottom has got a speed control h medium low used another on side of router everything is cool as cucumber thanks a lot for the info
I cannot believe that the year is 2022 and we are installing fans on top of WD HDD’s to cool them off. 
This, after a discussion in a thread that was started in 2014! Just to think that WD could not add a more powerful internal fan at a cost of a couple of bucks to the BOM. Truly a pathetic company!
My drives run at 28C (down almost 30 degrees C!) after installing the USB fan in the most efficient way: take off the grill, tape to the top of the box with two strips of Gorilla tape, blowing air IN.
P. S. Fan used: Amazon.com
Bought 3 fans from eBay usb flat with grills sat the drivers on the fansair blowing up wards plugged the usb into back of the wd no problems after that you can also vary the speed they run at Amazon sell £5.00 each
I’m very thankful to all the posts in this thread.
I learned about the EX2’s fan issue when I got one secondhand, and the original owner said the fan was dead and he had an external fan hooked up (looks just like one of the ones in this thread, so might have even been a poster here). When I got it, I realized the fan wasn’t dead since I could hear it spin up when booting. After lots of searches I found out how to ssh in and just run fan_control -f 6 and set the fan to 100% and not worry about the drives cooking. I think this was at least 2 years ago. I’ve been happy with the EX2 as a plain jane, basic NAS, especially when I’ve seen transfers as fast as 45MB/sec in JBOD mode.
Fast forward to a month ago and I found someone that was just basically getting rid of a WD MyCloud Mirror, which seemed like it was identical to the EX2 except white. I thought this was awesome to get since I liked my EX2 and knew how to get around any fan issues. Well, this one had a newer firmware and sure enough the fan would only stay on for a few seconds and then turn off again when running fan_control -f 6 like on my EX2. 
That’s where this thread came in handy. Lots of really neat pieces of code in here like the ‘watch’ command, which at first I thought just might be the answer–watch -n0 fan_control -f 6. But this only resulted in the fan turning on and off and not staying on steadily like I wanted. I looked into the python script, but I knew that might run into the same issue. I looked at altering some of the xml files and I think that’s where I found this nice tidbit about restarting the environmental monitor–/etc/init.d/wdtmsd restart. Looking into that further, it dawned on me that it seems that this was the thing that was turning the fan off as it was taking over the fan again. So I simply stopped it with ‘/etc/init.d/wdtmsd stop’ and then ran fan_control -f 6 and the fan is now purring away at 100% like it want it. 
Temps have dropped on everything all the way around too, so I’m happy.
I haven’t tested what this does in the webui yet and will post back what it says.
Here’s the TLDR on the way to control your fans just by SSH and in a non-permanent way:
- Enable ssh and set password in the web ui
- ssh in using sshd/your_password
- type in ‘fan_control -g 0’ to see your current temps
- type in ‘fan_control -g 4’ to see the current fan speed
- type in ‘/etc/init.d/wdtmsd stop’ to turn off the monitoring daemon
- type in ‘fan_control -f x’ where x is 1 to 6 to set your fan speed (6 is 9000 rpm)
- type in ‘fan_control -g 4’ to see the new fan speed
- type in ‘fan_control -g 0’ to see your new temps
Enjoy!
Edit: Just checked the webui and it’s not complaining and still showing all the temps, etc. 
2 Likes
shouldn’t this be fanless?
i have mini pc with usb disks.
no fans.
i would purchase only my cloud software but wd does not sell it separately from their devices.
I doubt WD monitors this… or cares TBH… but they really do need to add fan control to the web GUI. Fan doesn’t kick in until the temp hits 56’C from what the WD tech told me via email. Way too high and that fan is way too small and far from vent holes.
I was starting to design a 3D Print when I came across this one at THINGIVERSE. For a while I had a 120mm USB fan sitting on top running medium speed but half the air it was sucking up was from the gaps at the sides. This basically seals around the top and only draws out the air from inside. Then just needed some 1/2" rubber feet to raise it up for better air flow from the bottom.
What’s annoying is, it has to be run via USB and 24/7… I wanted to remove the 35mm internal fan and plug directly into where it was and set the temp down to 40’C and have the MyCloud handle it, but of course, can’t set the temperature!
I skimmed through the thread… very long thread… and saw a few things about SSH? Which I think is UNIX/LINUX? I dunno… doesn’t seem very average-end-user friendly.
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I just completed this setup. It was more of a pain than I anticipated. I used the NF-A8 FLX fan. The main problem I ran into was that occasionally the fan would fail to startup. I think the OEM fan takes less power to get started.
Hardware
I found the NF-A8 was big for Osfald’s design. I had to sand the fan compartment to make it fit. I also added a cutout for the power cord. Since the fan was a tight fit, I didn’t screw it in. There are 4 tabs on the top and bottom of the My Cloud towards the front to release the U-shaped cover. Unfortunately, I pressed one of them too hard. I removed the old fan, which was also pressure fit. The old fan cord was pressed between a support and metal cage. I ran the new cord between that support and U cover, looping through the top of the drive cage. I connected the 3D print to the My Cloud using cellphone glue, which can be dissolves with heat.
Software
I request access to ClarksonCote’s program_fan, but while I was waiting, I wrote my own, which I attached to this post if you want to use it. fan_control -f 3 spins the fan about 800 RPM when it works. This is below the fan minimum spec of 1.2K. I think the fan is designed to use at least 7 volts. fan_control -f 4 spins the fan at 1.3K, which is still very quiet. I have had occasions when the drive goes into standby (sleep option in UI) while the fan is on. When this happens, the drive stops reporting temperature changes, so I turn the fan off after 10 repeating temperatures. I made a WDMyCloudEX2 directory in My Cloud personal directory and placed setupFan.sh in it. Your My Cloud file permissions are probably 777, but you might have adjust with SSH.
chmod 777 /shares/xxx/WDMyCloudEX2/setupFan.sh
On Windows
I’m on Windows, so I also made a program that uses PuTTY to remotely start the fan speed controller. This allows me to start with just a double click anytime I restart My Cloud or run system test. I replaced personal info in the files with xxx. You will need to replace this with your specific info. You will also need SSH on to start this up. You can place setupFan.bat anywhere. I could not figure out why the command window stays open. I had to close it each time with the close button.
Files:
setupFan.sh
#!/bin/bash
echo Switching to alternative fan speed controller
# turn off default fan stopping job
/etc/init.d/wdtmsd stop
oldSpeed=-1
oldTemp=-1
repeatCount=0
numSetupsRunning=$((`ps | grep ${0##*/} | wc -l`))
if ((numSetupsRunning > 3))
then
echo Too many fan speed controllers running
exit -1
fi
while :
do
# fan_control retrieves last active/idle temperature, not standby
temperatures=`fan_control -g 0`
hd0temp=`echo "$temperatures" | grep hd0`
hd0temp=$((${hd0temp: -2}))
hd1temp=`echo "$temperatures" | grep hd1`
hd1temp=$((${hd1temp: -2}))
driveTemp=$(( $hd0temp > $hd1temp ? $hd0temp : $hd1temp ))
# educated guess at temperature cutoffs
if (($driveTemp > 51)) || (($driveTemp > 47 && $oldSpeed >= 6))
then
newSpeed=6
elif (($driveTemp > 46)) || (($driveTemp > 42 && $oldSpeed >= 5))
then
newSpeed=5
elif (($driveTemp > 41)) || (($driveTemp > 36 && $oldSpeed >= 4))
then
newSpeed=4 # speeds less than 4 do not work well on low speed fans
else
newSpeed=0
fi
if (($driveTemp == $oldTemp))
then
repeatCount=$((repeatCount + 1))
else
repeatCount=0
oldTemp=$driveTemp
fi
# drive must be in standby
if (($repeatCount > 10))
then
newSpeed=0
fi
if (($oldSpeed != $newSpeed))
then
fan_control -f $newSpeed
fi
echo hard drive temperature $driveTemp
echo same temperature found $repeatCount times
echo calculating an index $newSpeed
echo
oldSpeed=$newSpeed
sleep 200 # temperature rises about half a degree per minute
done
setupFan.bat
@echo off
echo Setting up fan speed control on xxx
echo Set http://xxx-Settings-Network Services-SSH ON before running this script.
echo Run after each system start or system test
start /b plink -ssh sshd@xxx -pw xxx "nohup /shares/xxx/WDMyCloudEX2/setupFan.sh 2>&1 > /dev/null &"
