Part II Knives out for the My Cloud Home
Yes, the use of two 5 or 6 inch steak knives really is the best way to release the black plastic cage from the white casing which is sometimes difficult to release - don’t force or stab the knives in, just lubricate the tips of the knives with a little petroleum jelly or pork lard if you prefer /j, and slip it behind the plastic catch that is holding each side of the case against the drive cage, it should release without much effort.
The rest of the hard disk drive can be removed by loosening the 4 Torx #8 screws and two Phillips screws.
Once the hard disk is out, you can plug into the SATA ports (2 free ports suggested as USB support may be lacking in some partition and cloning software) of a PC and resize and clone the hard drive. Do not use Windows partition software because most of them don’t support Linux very well and no software can yet recognized the proprietary WD partition file system and they will show up as unknown partition as shown below. The following is the result of some trial and error and the result was successful in cloning the original WD40EFAX 4TB and resizing its partition #24 into a much smaller 0.5TB SSD drive. I would suggest anyone wishing to try this to read 'HOWTO: Restoring to a smaller disk.’ from Rescuezilla (free but donate ware) and Rescuezill boot iso disk is the one to try to accomplish this. Rescuezilla iso is compatible with Ventoy, so it is possible to have a menu system from a bootable flash drive with a dozen resident iso on the flash drive.
Once the cloning is done, reattach the main board of the My Cloud Home and power up. One could test the unit and power up without reassembling the entire unit, but be careful attaching the cables as the unit can easily fall apart without support. A temporary make shift plastic holder can act as the casing such as shown below:
Results: random writes no longer zero
Well, the random writes are no longer zero. One way to look at this is that anything is better than zero, or the random write performance has increased by >=357 times to infinity over zero.
Finally, the SSD performance of writing and sharing and then deleting a folder (of 700 files total 300 MB) into a zip file with mx=0 option on the My Cloud Home private space has improved by ~20 seconds or nearly 50% over the original stock My Cloud Home (with hard disk WD40EFAX). This method was described in an earlier post for rapidly sharing and/or deleting a large number of files.
