It feels like WD is running a test to see how stupid their customers are… they’re going to give us a 20% discount on a preselected, overpriced device - that they will let us use for a couple of years and then discontinue again….
What they’re doing should be illegal. Sign me up for any class action suits that arise from this arrogant stupidity.
3rd Party Firmware?
In the meantime - is there any custom firmware we can install so that we can run OpenMediaVault or some other product? Debian? Ubuntu? Fedora?
Shucking?
Can the hard drive inside this thing be removed easily so it can be used in another system ?
I will never buy another Western Digital product - and I’ll make sure the dozens of people who come to me for IT advice also go with Seagate or anyone BUT Western Digital. 20% is a frigging slap in the face. 50% off the best price we can find ON ANY SIMILAR PRODUCT would be reasonable. 20% off of their own store price - on only 2 possible devices - what a joke! Anyone who takes them up on that offer should be shot. 20% off the WD Store price is probably still 10% more than Best Buy or Amazon are selling it for.
Apparently, these devices can be switched to 3rd party software but it’s tedious, error prone, and buggy. Search this forum for more details. Yes, the drive can be removed, reinitialized, partitioned and formatted.
Thanks for the reply…. I guess if the hardware isn’t robust enough to even handle a minimal install of a modern Linux distribution, I’m not going to feel so bad about stripping the hard drive and putting it in a raid enclosure attached to an old laptop running OpenMediaVault…. shrugs
That 20% discount offer is just soooo insulting…. Argh!!!
Maybe I’ll give it a shot. If it fails - or if there isn’t a firmware, I’ll just shuck it for the drive - so not a big deal if I end up bricking it…. Thanks for the reply…
No one is forcing you to use the 20% discount WD is offering. One is free to buy from another manufacture. As to being illegal. Seriously? The products that WD has blocked from OS5 updates are almost, if not all, at End of Product Support. Some, like the first gen single bay My Cloud, have been end of support for a couple of years now (since 2019 for firmware).
Yes there are various past discussions in the OS3 My Cloud subforum covering attempting to use other operating systems on the single bay/single drive My Cloud units. Some have been successful some not so much.
Use the forum search feature, magnifying glass icon upper right, to find those past discussions. Including a discussion link another user already posted.
Yes the drive can be “shucked” and then used in a computer, external docking station/external USB to SATA adapter, or in another NAS enclosure. Note that the single bay My Cloud’s typically contain a WD Red hard drive in them. Those WD Red drives may have certain limitations like being SMR or have low RPM speed or low cache. All of which may result in slower read/write speeds when used in other NAS devices or connected directly to a computer or USB to SATA adapter/docking port. Some NAS boxes may have issues with SMR drives. See this WD Blog post on SMR drives.
The reality is the OS3 My Cloud devices should continue to work just fine for local network access. WD is primarily killing off the remote access feature (via MyCloud.com and the OS3 My Cloud mobile apps) to the OS3 drives. One can use alternate methods for remote access including VPN, FTP, etc to regain remote access when WD terminates OS3 remote access support next April.
One is free to do what some of us have done. Move on to using other manufacturer’s NAS boxes and either relegating the My Cloud to secondary uses or disconnecting and not using (or throwing out) the My Cloud.
Thanks for the detailed answer. Recently I’ve shucked a lot of old 1 and 2 TB external drives that were in USB2 enclosures and was surprised to find some pretty decent drives inside (7200 rpm). I’ve got more than a dozen drives - about half are 2.5” drives I removed from old laptops and the other half are 3.5” drives I either purchased outright for a 5-bay terramaster raid box or shucked from USB enclosures. Some of them are 12 years old. All of them except for one are still fully operational and work fine.
The one drive that is completely dead is a Western Digital 6TB Red drive that is barely 5 years old and was definitely not heavily used.
I think the Single bay MyCloud (and the Gen 1 dual bay MyClouds) predated the WD SMR Red drive debacle. So I thin it’s safe to say if you “shuck” a WD Red from any of the EOL NAS, they will be the original CMR drives and not SMR drives.
Only way to know for sure is to pull the drive and compare it’s model number against WD’s list of SMR/CMR drives. Of course this assumes that WD is being fully honest about all of their SMR drives and that they are all listed at that blog post (or elsewhere). But in reality not sure how much of a difference a CMR drive would make with the single bay due to it’s very low end hardware and limited RAM.
