I’ve been using WD products for a long time, but I’ve finally had my fill of the problems and incompatabilities. Some of these incompatabilities are between WD products like the WDTV SMP and the MyCloud. As noted in many many threads, getting one device to work the way it’s supposed to is a chore. When you have two devices from the same vendor not working with each other, where to you even begin to point a finger?
These WD devices are sold in consumer stores, and non-technical customers buy them and are dumbfounded attempting to make them work. I’ve been a computer systems analyst for 30 years, and these devices have just gotten the better of me. If a seasoned computer guy has issues, how in the world does WD expect the average non-tech consumer to figure it out?
I stopped updating the firmware on my WDTV SMP years ago. It was stable, did what I needed and I was able to watch my movies. There were so many horror stories about updates that I decided to leave well enough alone. It worked.
When the MyCloud came out, I thought it would be a great companion device to the SMP for movie storage. I got one, set it up, and it seemed stable, but performance was always an issue. Even over hardwire connections there were hesitations. Uploads take much longer than they need to. I turned off everything that wasn’t required for simple Windows sharing and performance was still lacking.
This is the straw that broke me: I filled the 3TB drive and needed more space. The MyCloud has the option of using an external drive to expand capability, so I tried it. The WD USB3 drive I used worked fine, was recognised and was available as a share to the SMP. Great! But I soon discovered that even tho the SMP had full read/write permission to the external drive, it simply would not retrieve and store meta data. It would create the .wdtv folder, so I knew the SMP had all the right accesses. I could manually get the meta data and it would be stored on the exteranl drive, just wouldn’t happen automatically. Thought maybe it had to do with the files being at the root level of the drive, so I created a sub-folder and put the movies in there, and re-pointed the SMP to map to the sub-folder on the external drive. The SMP successfully found and linked to the sub-folder. Tried to access a movie from the SMP, and it couldn’t find the directory, even tho the mapping was successful. Tried a number of different scenarios, none worked. Moved my movie file back to the root of the external drive, remapped the SMP, and it worked, but still would not auto-update the meta data.
Where do you even begin to isolate an issue like that between two devices when issues on one device can’t be resolved? I’m going back to USB drives connected directly to the SMP and moving all my media files off of the MyCloud. I’ll use the MyCloud for laptop backups, something that doesn’t need high performance.
I’m also going to do some serious investigation into a media player other than WD products.
There are those that will say that many of my issues will go away if I upgrade to current versions. I’m done chasing that stick. I want something that works off the shelf.
