I was really optimistic about the EX4100 (16tb) when i brought it home. But the experience of owning it has been a long way from the advertising spin. In the 2 weeks since I installed it on my 6-month old iMac my journey has one one long disappointing road of issues of non performance.
With only 2 TB of data sitting on them and no up or download activity happening, the drives chatter non-stop 24/7 - it drives me insane as the silence of my mac has been totally shattered by what sounds like a distant gattling gun in the background, little blue lights flashing constantly like night-club strobes. In the end I simply shut the thing down to get some respite such is Worse still is the way the NAS seemingly keeps disappearing off my mac - click on its name in mac’s Finder and you just get a prompt that says it can’t be opened because the original item cant’ be found. Click - and yet 2 hours before it could.
Click on the Network logo and up comes a way into MyCloud where at least I can and navigate the folders…go back to the MyCloud logo and and it sees it cant be found. So many times I cannot launch the dashboard - click on the WD logo to connect and nothing happens…eventually I’m told no server. Each and every time I have had to resort to uninstalling everything and starting again…which works for a short while and then back to this misery of dead-ends, constant machine-gun fire noise and complete unreliability. Product support in Australia is non-existent, there is no phone or online support - just useless emails from somebody continents away who takes 24 to 48 hours to respond to the question…are you listening WD? These types of issues need two-way live conversation to resolve - whats offered to me here in Australia where Ive invested over $1600 in this unit amounts to little more than a pony express approach that simply doesn’t stack up.
Sorry for the rant but I reckon I have a fair gripe with this product and lack of effective real-time support
Sorry to hear about your experience. If you have not tried the system only restore suggested by jpeng I would suggest trying that. Also make sure you are running the latest firmware.
The Australian phone support numbers can be found at the following link. Just select Australia for your country.
Good morning…thank you for the advice. I tried the system restore but unfortunately that didn’t help a great deal…the drives still chattered loudly, endlessly - even when there was absolutely no data activity taking place. And so I have opted for the full restore to see if that helps. Fortunately, I had only loaded about 3TB of data on the system and so it’s not any major inconvenience to do this.
It’s perhaps interesting to note that while I am writing this email to you, the lights for all four drives in the Ex4100 are strobing away wildly as the system restores - if I get close to the unit I can just hear the drives unobtrusively ticking over randomly as they go through the process - the fan speed has also dropped to 600 (640 before). Compared to the loud constant chattering of the drives and elevated fan speed (when there was actually no data being moved or backups occurring) that was going on before, this is bliss and pretty much in line with how the system operated when I first unboxed and hooked it up. Hopefully, by restarting from scratch, my WD system will perform to the high standards it has been engineered to deliver. If not, I’ll come back to you for further discussion.
Cheers - Kevin
Good morning jpeng…thank you for taking the time to consider my problem and offer me some useful advice - you might be interested to know that WD support also saw my post and to its credit, contacted me to recommend I try the option you spoke of - and so I am sending WD support basically this same email. I tried the system restore but unfortunately that didn’t help a great deal…the drives still chattered loudly, endlessly: even when there was absolutely no data activity taking place. And so I have opted for the full restore to see if that helps. Fortunately, I had only loaded about 3TB of data on the system and so it’s not any major inconvenience to do this.
It’s perhaps interesting to note that while I am writing this email to you, the lights for all four drives in the Ex4100 are strobing away wildly as the system restores - if I get close to the unit I can just hear the drives unobtrusively ticking over randomly as they go through the process - the fan speed has also dropped to 600 (640 before). Compared to the loud constant chattering of the drives and elevated fan speed (when there was actually no data being moved or backups occurring) that was going on before, this is bliss and pretty much in line with how the system operated when I first unboxed and hooked it up. Hopefully, by restarting from scratch, my WD system will perform to the high standards it has been engineered to deliver.
Well here we are almost 10 hours into the factory restore process and sill I have nothing to work with. The progress line on the Factory Restore graphic shows zero percent complete and the digital read-out on the unit itself shows me as having zero storage. I think it’s time to return this unit to WD for either a full refund or at the very least, swap it out for a new unit. In the 16 days I have owned this, I have not had a single day of reliable use. I have not had a single day of it doing the things your advertising says it will and I have not had a single day where everything worked on it. All I have is a blue-strobing nightclub lightshow sitting in the corner with it’s own percussion accompaniment keeping rhythm. I believe I’ve shown an extraordinary level of patience so far. But the time is up. Please advise what action you propose now. Fortunately I have kept the original packaging ready for its return to you.
By now you have most likely solved this problem; but I was wondering if you were using this unit as an external primary SYSTEM C:/ drive. If so, and depending on many other things, the light show and endless chattering could be your SYSTEM communicating with the page/swap file. Just a thought.
