Was performing some drive cleanup today and decided to copy some files from my attached cloud device, the USB WD 4TB drive to an attached 1TB WD USB 3 drive on my computer and I got fantastic transfer speeds of 60MB/s. I am completely stoked on the fantanstic speed that I’m getting on an attached device. I still remember testing an attached USB 3 drive on a router that supported USB 3 and I got a disappointing 17MB/s reads.
As I said before, I was very happy with my purchases and 6 months later, I am still not disappointed. Since there isn’t very many happy stories, I thought I would post one up before disappearing again.
and by the way I will not be updating my firmware until the cows come home…
After my last fiasco with updating the firmware and rebooting with the drive stuck in white light mode for 3 hours disallowing me to SSH into the device which caused my panic to completely reset my device, I’ve decided that I won’t be updating my firmware unless the next firmware fixes the sleep mode; I mean total sleeping that deactivates all linux jobs from running including the ones around 8AM.
Currently I have deactivated all cron jobs, all scans, all db indexing. Turn on sleep when I head to bed, turn off sleep during the day when I accessing the cloud. I can access the device when I’m away from home without any problems; without the scans I just don’t get the thumbnails on my photos or movies which is fine.
With most of the programs deactivated for over 6 months, it goes to show that an almost barebone Cloud is feasible. Although I don’t use twonky or media tv. I do use itunes that access the Cloud as a mapped local drive.
To WD, simplify your drive.
This is a simple NAS and there is no reason for multiple programs running in the background. Although I appreciate that this is a tiny computer running on my bookshelf, there is absolutely nothing that is needed to run on a daily basis.
If you need to scan, make it user activated; in other words add a button to the menu so the user can click on scan and watch the scan work with full status on a tiny window.
The problem with your WD software, is that like the white light that stays on for several hours and we have no idea of what is going on. Just like your scanning, although we see a message that the device is initializing or scanning, the device is basically dead for hours. Lets put it this way, my TV does not initialize for 3 hours, in fact if it initializes for more then 1 minute, I would take the TV back to the store. There is never a point in where the device should be doing something without the user knowing and if it is which is what we are complaining about, your device is faulty.
When I go to sleep, my Mac is asleep, so is my PC and for the last 6 months the WD has been doing pretty well, waking only every couple of hours probably to tinkle despite my deactivation of the Cron. Something keeps waking up my cloud at 8am, 8:30am and 8:52am everyday.
but all in all, I’m still happy with my purchases…
and I still get the odd private msg from our friendly Troll telling me that my kudos has gone down, but I see that he has pushed my kudos back to the top again.
I’ll check in again in 6 months…
Regards…
If you want a powerhouse NAS, then buy one of those hockey puck PC’s that allows you to attach several USB 3 devices to it, then either install linux, or even run windows as a server. It would be cheaper then a QNAP device.
