Yes I have an EX2 Ultra now so why am I posting this back in my old stomping grounds? because there are about 3 users in the EX2 forums; including myself so I get about 3 reads in 6 hours.
The EX2 ultra is identical to the Single Bay My Clouds anyways so any complaint about the EX2 is a complaint about the My Cloud.
So with a little bit more time on my hands these days I decided to let the drive run as-is with indexing and building up the thumbnails so that you get this tiny little photo, the size of a pea, on the left side of your photo of which you have to click on it in order to see what you are looking at. There is absolutely no way to identify the photo by the thumbnail. A total waste of time for WD to build up these thumbnails that you can’t even see.
The building up of these thumbnails drove me crazy as it took over a week (4 x 24 hour days actually) to scan through my whole 9TB of data with 3TB of photos including NEF, Panoramic, weddings, headshots and so forth but the unit rattled through the night, through the day, through the night, chattering away, building up speed at certain times and churning at my panoramic. The fan on the EX2 also started ramping up to over 10,000 RPMS whining away like a turbo jet and whines through the night.
At times I would SSH into the device to see what it is doing… and there it was… converting my photo into a thumbnail…
I waited patiently because after almost a decade of using WD live/cloud products I want to see and hear if after scanning all the files, “is it true?” does the My Cloud actually sleep?
Many times, I was tempted to kill the services and just do what I have been doing for all these years. Killing the services to make the “my Cloud” work like it should have in the first place.
The fan on the EX2 was the biggest issue because for some reason the fan started ramping up in noise up to 10,000 rpm even though the drives were only reporting 51 degrees. I had even modified the fan table so it would stay off until 60 degrees. For some reason that fan table doesn’t work, thus all night long the EX2 acted like a very noisyvheater.
Then suddenly one day the device was quiet… It was sleeping. So it is true that once all your data is scanned and thumbnailed, it does go to sleep; albeit not completely as the cron and other linux activities seems to wake up the drive for a few minutes on the hour.
If however, deleting the time machine backup of 100GB, the scans starts all over again and this time I didn’t see any conversions but scanning through all my files took a couple of days.
I hate it. Any change on the drive causes the scans to erupt into a flurry of activity.
I hate it. Click-a-Click-a-click-a-click… and on and on and on… like somebody from outside is hacking my device… and it does this every firetruck time I add or delete a bunch of files.
Yes I know that turning off “Cloud” access will turn off the media scans, but for goodness sakes
“PLEASE give us a switch to turn off the scans” even with “Cloud ON”
I want “Cloud” access and it works perfectly fine without thumbnails.
This is the one unnecessary feature that has driven all your customers away. Even users on the EX2 forum has asked about the noisy fan that runs all night. Ramping down the fan isn’t the problem, dialing down the scans so they don’t affect your normal usage isn’t the problem.
The problem is that your (WD) is the only company that has unauthorized scans on a NAS device and you re-start the scans whenever the drive changes. You re-build the thumbnails whenever your firmware changes. Not only do you scan the EX2, you then scan the attached USB drive if the option of “cloud” access is turned on for the USB drive.
**THIS IS UNWARRANTED!! and UNNECESSARY SCANNING!! **
You have LOST-A-LOT of sales because of this one fact
You have RMA almost every 2 drives that you sold because of this fact
You rewrote the whole forum software to keep out unhappy people because of this fact
Recently I’ve bought a couple of drives from eBay at a very low price and I’m getting these brand new un-opened drives at sell-out prices and I’m suspecting that you have a lot of unhappy customers which meant that you have a lot of inventory because you think that everyone wants to use the cloud now but not yours.
I’ll repeat it again that because of this one fact that your devices basically scans for a whole week, non-stop, with full fans blasting (on the EX2) that your customers goes “WTH???” and even your seasoned Customer like myself after a few days of it was ready to throw his device out the window; I kid you not because it is incessant noise.
You know what really gets my sheep… is that after knowing all this and half a decade later, you still don’t change it.
All you have done over the last half decade is to make the scans a lower priority.
That isn’t the solution.
The solution is "DO NOT SCAN THE DRIVES for thumbnails.
Also you do not build indexes on the drive for quick searches. Yes I know Apple does this, but it is on a much much much smaller scale of 100GBs on most Macs and they leave well enough alone for the rest of the data.
@Bill_S, @Great_Scottt
Pass it on please… I think it is time for WD to have a Thumbnail Switch OFF, Media Scan Switch OFF, Indexing Switch OFF. CRON OFF.
This was in the idea box for years and your answers were the Cloud Switch. That isn’t good enough. Really. There is absolutely no reasons for a Cloud device to scan willy nilly all through the night for a whole week with the fans at full blast. If you have doubts, go check on the number of returns you had for the last half decade.
It is time to include a switch.
Give it some great labels like.
Thumbnails ON- for instantaneous iPhone browsing
Indexer ON- for great file searches
Movies Thumbnails ON- Plex like covers
Heater ON - for cold nights
Thankfully, I am now using my script to turn everything off so it is now sitting quietly, finally.
Wait I stand corrected that not only do you create a thumbnail but you resize the photo so that it downloads quickly on iPhone devices. I totally understand the reason for it. However you still cannot do it for every file on the hard drive because that isn’t YOUR choice as a device.
ON/OFF and perhaps a box to add paths to photos and/or media that you can scan.