Rant! The perpetual Scans forever and ever and ever - frustrated with road rage type anger

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
23

Yes, you can by turning off Cloud services which turns off photodbmerger and wdmcserver, which is how WD fixed it when we asked for a switch several years ago.

However I do want Cloud services so I can access my files outside my home and I do want the scans disabled.

Personally I don’t think that this will ever get fixed because WD has already abandon the My Clouds Personal and has moved onwards to the My Clouds Home of which Cloud service is probably always on and thus thumbnails, resized photos and probably file indexing is a requirement to simulate instant access.

WD is no longer listening and even the Customer threat of moving to a real NAS no longer triggers a response. We are being ignored now.

24

I would not say WD has moved away from My Cloud toward the Home devices. Their actual NAS devices will remain, but they do appear to have quit making the bottom line My Clouds.

25

yes, but for how long?

When I started noticing that I didn’t see the “bottom line My Clouds” anymore which includes the My Cloud Mirror of which I had coveted for the last two years, it spurred me into buying a bunch of EX2 Ultras, just in case they also disappear. I had always liked the My Clouds despite the fact that they went with Busybox thus limiting the amount of hacking that we could do; i.e. no longer a true blue bootable linux box.

However you can feel it in the air as recently I’ve been able to buy up a large number of discontinued My Books Duo and EX2 Ultras at ridiculously low prices complete with pairs of hard drives.

By large numbers, I mean three of each at half the retail price; I couldn’t help it because I bought a discontinued Brand new 6TB My Book duo for only $200 previously retailing at $500. You can also pick up a Brand new My Cloud Mirror for $275 of which they were retailing at $700. I don’t know what to do with all this storage except to test various scenarios. Right now one of them is a straight on iSCSI box which unfortunately is half the speed of SMB because the implementation of iSCSI is actually on an image rather than true direct to hard disk iSCSI.

So what does the number of unsold discontinued My Clouds tell me? Well they tell me that they didn’t sell well.

This is why WD has re-packaged the same My Clouds into a “hands off” My Cloud Home that takes away the NAS and attempts to give you the full Cloud feeling as you are always connected to your “My Cloud” whether you are at home or on the road; much like the iPhone Wifi calling. This is the reason that you are always connected to WD Cloud servers so that as you move from home to the road there is no discontinuity of services.

There is also one more thing that takes us away from NAS and that is Netflix, Amazon Prime movies, Apple TV and all the other movie streams out there. Recently I subscribed to DramaFever as I got addicted to Korean movies despite the fact that I’m not korean, nor do I understand korean but I love the movies with captions. There are so many streams out there that not only do Cable companies suffer, so does the companies who create hard disk storage.

Add in the other factor that takes away from home storage are Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora and other music streaming.

We are left with only photos and personal docs which fits nicely into Apple Cloud and Amazon Unlimited Photo storage. I’m sure Google photo storage has that ability too but recently I heard that they want money; not sure since I don’t use Google photo storage anymore after discovering that they had resized all my photos in the heyday of cloud photo storage.

The last feeling about how WD is doing are by these forums. It use to be @Bill_S, @Great_Scottt and so many other moderators getting involved. Perhaps they still do but they are certainly ignoring me these days. The forums have gone quiet except for the fire in the My Cloud Home.

Granted WD had better keep up the cloud servers otherwise there will be a lot of useless My Cloud Homes out there but keeping up the line of EX NAS servers? No idea, but I do noticed that Costco doesn’t sell the 4 bay EX series anymore… is that a sign? don’t know…

I think WD is struggling with hard drives at home storage sales, but “what do I know?” as I’m just another customer with my two cents opinion :stuck_out_tongue:.

26

With the single bay My Cloud being pulled from various retailers, I have to wonder how much longer WD will invest in updating the firmware to fix various security issues of the existing single bay units? When they eventually get around to fixing them.

27

WD will continue with their NAS devices until they want to give all the NAS business to Sinology, QNAP etc.

28

Maybe they should just re-cast the firmware a little, change the product line name, and sell small linux servers to enthusiasts instead?

Oh, who am I kidding, they freaking hate doing proper support NOW-- They would never do this kind of thing.

29

for the last week or so, I’ve been letting the device be itself without any service shutdowns and as long as I don’t copy files over to it the device sleeps soundly with only an occasional wake-up. So I guess you can say they have fixed the sleeping problem.

The only annoyance is that after copying 2GB of files to it there is a flurry of activity for a good solid 9 minutes after the copying has completed; I guess this is the price of leaving Cloud access on.

After the flurry of clicks it goes back to sleep when the default 10 minutes is up. There is no clicking because it is sleeping.

This is the reason that WD won’t be adding the scan switches as it seems that their job is done.

  1. sleep - check
  2. scans priority low - steps aside during the first few days of scan activities. - check
  3. scans do complete including thumbnails of NEFs and very large panorama’s as well as resizing photos for quick downloads. - check
  4. discontinued - check
  5. all the firmware writers have quit or have moved onwards - check

Well, I can’t really say that I am that annoyed anymore since I got what I paid for; a low cost NAS/Cloud device that is one-fourth the price of a QNAP.

Yup I kept checking and re-checking a QNAP that was priced at $800 and almost clicked on the “Buy now” button and I know that I would probably fall in love with the QNAP because, for one thing, the QNAP won’t be reading my emails and looking at my photos at 2AM in the morning, but

after all the “My Cloud” testing, I have come to the two conclusion that
“for what it is worth”,
“It is what it is”
I will always be the owner of a cheap WD My Cloud.

It is almost like owning a raspberry Pi with two hard drives in a nice Book enclosure.

I’ve re-added the wish “Please add switch to turn off wdmcserver, wdphotodbmerger on My Cloud boot up” in “Cloud ideas”

and @Brandon.P has suggested that I should contact WD’s Technical Support for this and perhaps we all should contact tech support and see if they are still RMA’ing clicking clouds?

For the moment I have stopped ranting and raving because the clicking has stopped and my entitlement has dissipated. However for some reason, probably the price, I managed to acquire two more 8TB Blacks for use on a 2nd EX2 which might mean that I might be tempted to move/copy just the photos to it which may mean another week of clickity-clicks and turbo fans at which my rage will return but I think I just might have to move all of my cloud units into a closet and sound-proof it.

IMG_4941_fixed
IMG_4941_fixed2851×2138 2.43 MB

30

I decided to finally do a time machine backup of my MacBook and after three hours of backup of 200GB into a sparse index folder, which is really thousands and thousands of individual 8GB files, the “My Cloud” is clicking away incessantly again for several days now.

I created the time machine backup in my normal media shares and not in my Time Machine Shares, which perhaps may be the solution to this clicking because the kids at WD may have programmed the scans to not scan the Time Machine shares.

Thankfully the fan is not turning on.

WD you gotta put in that switch to turn off those scanning services because this is driving me nuts.

31

Just put in a regex with killall and have it run in a user init.

If you REALLY mean it, have it delete the daemon executables from the ramdisk too.

Ultimately futile, as they will be back on reboot, but cathartic none the less.

32

Why not use the fun_plug feature to kill those processes you don’t want running?

1 Like
33

fun_plug would be much more useful if it did not have to live on the USB port.

34

you know. that’s actually something that i’ve never thought about! thanks for sharing it! lately i am more focused since i’m on best peptides and since i found this forum site. thanks.

35

Yes it would. But it checks all USB devices that are connected. On the Dlink DNS-323 they checked the a2 partition for fun_plug. Not sure if you could modify system_init to look else where. But I think that the mfg_start would also need to be modified. Or if you do modify system_init. Have it start fun_plug.

36

almost at that point again… but I’m trying to see if I can run it as-is

noooooo and have this dongle thingy sticking out the back of my nice looking My Cloud?

The fan is on at 10,000000000000 rpm now on my ex2… wd… fix this!!!

37

Actually you can connect a Micro SD to the back. It only sticks out about 1/2 inch. Bu the way I think I found a possible way to simulate wake on lan. Connect the device to one of the wifi power plugs. Then when you want to turn off the device just shut it dump. Then power off the wifi plug. When you want to wake it up power on the wifi plug. This method should allow you to control the device from anywhere.

38

you read my post somewhere @rac8006,

I like the idea… actually :stuck_out_tongue:

39

There are very low profile USB sticks that barely stick out of the port.

See for instance, sandisk’s cruzer fit series.

The EX2 has 2 usb ports, but I hate to blow one like this. I would much rather put two USB ethernet PHYs on, and find a way to build the appropriate driver .ko files and load them.

40

you know @Wierd_w, I love your ideas but I’m glad you don’t work for WD because we would have a monstrosity of a My Cloud/SUPER NAS/8ETHERNET/RAID8000/Debian on a simulated VM Windows 12 with 18 eSata ports.

For me, I just need to rebuild init to run without the recursive directory scans and minus the two photodbmerger and wdmcserver services.

my problem is that I love to procrastinate…

41

Says the man who does not know the joys of multipath io…

1 Like
42

One could rebuild system_init to call fun_plug from /mnt/HD/HD_a2. Files don’t get removed from this location.
Once build and installed. You only need to modify fun_plug as changes are needed. I would put the test and call for fun_plug near the call to mfg_start.