It has been an arduous week mainly due to the 30 plus hours of file copying and 3 days of file compares to ensure that the data arrived safe and it did, and another 30 hours was spent on duplicating the copied files to the second Cloud that is now assigned the task of being the mirror.
As you can see, my bookshelf has cleaned up nicely reducing the clutter of
3xclouds
3xMybooks
1x8port switch
6xpower adapters mounted on a power bar on the wall
down to
2xClouds
2xpoweradapters on the floor.
With book covers, the bookshelf is once again a covert data center.
Seriously I have mixed feelings about the BusyBox OS as WD has completely removed all possibility of hacking the not-quite-linux in a closed garden box. I do not know if you can even downgrade to the last version as any modification to the files are lost upon reboot as it rebuilds a fresh new copy of its OS into Ramdrive.
Logs are almost non-existent as sleep info is no longer logged, thus removing the OCD need to ensure that the drive sleeps through the night. It wakes at 8AM for atop that rotates your log files and deletes older logs. Throughout the day it will wake for various services of which you have no control over,since you cannot kill the cron but since you don’t have any control you begin to realize that you really don’t care anymore and you let it run as it was designed to run. However, with the Cloud Access set to OFF, the scans do seem to be turned off and the drive does sleep for hours on end but not days.
You can also SSH to the drive and “stop” the scans since the programmers left exactly the 4 file controls you need to turn them off (I have no idea why but the files are just sitting there), but the scans automatically turn themselves back on when you remote access the drive thus making the control files totally moot. In fact if you had the scans off and had 3 attached USB drives, the system will power up the scans and lock your system when you attempt to use remote access.
The only way to ensure that remote access will work is that you need to let the scans run from the start up of the Cloud. Even with the attached USB drives (tested up to 3 attached drives) and the scans running in the background (you can tell by the incessant hard drive chatter), remote access to all drives including the attached USB drives are lightning fast.
I gave up trying fix the Cloud and instead use the cloud for what it is - a cloud drive. It is fast with up to 120MB/s reads and 100MB/s writes on the local network, access of the attached USB drives are about 80MB/s writes and 100MB/s reads which is amazing since even a direct read/write USB3 drive is around the same speed; thus you almost get USB3 speeds through a network cable.
The most fascinating part to the new cloud is the ability to use a un-powered USB3 hub to connect 3xUSB3 MyBooks to the cloud making the NAS as versatile as its QNap brethren. I probably could connect more, but I only had 3 drives to test with.
Small minor changes includes making Public Shares private, sending links to files do work now although it may have worked with gen1 but I had never tested it again until now. Turning on Cloud access will turn on the scans and it is still a notoriously agonizingly resource hogging program where everything on the NAS slows down to a crawl, but the saving grace is that the gen2 device is a little bit faster and the programmers have programmed the scans to recognize that the user takes priority, thus starting up a movie automatically reduces the priority on the scans and on many occasions the scans stops immediately until it notices a lull in your activities before the annoying clicking resumes.
Understandably that once upon a time we bought the Clouds as a linux in a box with an attached hard drive NAS as a bonus. We fell in love the quirky linux in a box Cloud that we managed to patch and was waiting for WD tp release a full patched system with OS3 but instead we got this new and improved Cloud that doesn’t resemble anything that we knew of.
Today it is a full fledge turn-key Cloud-NAS box that actually works as is. The scans no longer crashes the system nor do they hinder access to multiple attached USB drives. It really seems that the Cloud has finally grown up to be the Cloud that we had always wanted. Do we want it though?
The honeymoon is over and the new cloud is sitting in the same place where the old clouds use to sit. I mostly ignore whether or not the Cloud is asleep as it does sleep but I know not how deeply nor how long. Both drives have been set to Cloud Access OFF so that it doesn’t scan my files.
I’ll probably turn on Cloud Access to the Main Cloud soon to allow remote access so I can watch movies in the gym.
The new and improved My Cloud is a breath of fresh air and I no longer SSH into the drive to set the drive to no-sleep, nor do I check how soundly the drive slept last night and finally the most important is that after this, I won’t have anything to complain about since the new Clouds seems to be working smoothly and silently; for now.
Congrats to WD on a very successful product.
p.s. Please WD, add the feature of allowing us to turn the scans off even with Cloud Access. Thank you.
