I’ve just ordered another 8TB Cloud from Costco thinking that there might be something wrong with my current cloud but most likely it is a software issue but nevertheless I don’t want to take the chance that this ticking may be the start of a degrading cloud.
It is ticking when the drive is awake. It is a slow heavy “tick” every two to three seconds as though a log is steadily being written.
The other 8TB cloud does not exhibit this symptom. The other 8TB cloud is set to cloud access OFF and sleeps through the day and night with occasional wake ups but no ticks or tocks.
Scans have completed on 750,000 items on the hard drive.
I’ve turn cloud access off - ticking continues
I’ve toggled media DLNA and iTunes server on/off
I’ve toggled logging on/off and rebooted many times
I’ve stopped all scans using the /etc/init.d/wdmcserverd stop method
I’ve toggled cloud access on then used the above step to stop the scans
I’ve killall crond (this kills all cron jobs)
I’ve stopped samba using smb stop, ticking continues
and still the heavy slow ticking continues. Even though the drive seems to sleep… it seems to wake up quite often, slow tock for ten minutes then goes back to sleep.
This was the first 8TB cloud that I got and I did accidentally shoved it and tilted but not dropped when it was copying data. Possible reason for ticking?
I’ve managed to figure out the order of cancelling the scans as well as stopping the cron to get the drive to sleep. This was out of frustration when the ticking continued through some parts of the day and through the night, usually when cron wakes it up.
Once again I’m angry because I’m spending an inordinate amount of time debugging this unit and once again nobody knows why.
I do not look forward to getting this other Costco drive and spending another week filling it and comparing the data but I have to do it before my 90 days runs out on my first two drives.
edit: The ticking apparently is normal after you copy a bunch of data onto it. It is not the normal wdmcserverd or wdphotodbmergerd scans, nor DLNA, twonky or iTunes server. No idea of what it is…
Strongly suggest contacting WD Support 1 (800) 275-4932
I do not want to trade in my brand new Cloud for a re-furbished one 
Now that Costco has my drives again (they ran out of stock last month), I can return my clicking drive under the 90 days return policy and buy a new one; or buy a new one, copy the data, then return the old one.
As nice as WD Support people are, many of the forum folks actually knows a lot more about the cloud then tech support.
If the clicking persist on the new cloud, at least I know it is not a drive that is going bad.
So the slow ticking sound is apparently normal as my backup Archive cloud is now exhibiting the same symptoms, after syncing it with new data yesterday. Today it would wake up and slow click for 10 minutes then goes back to sleep.
It is not the normal wdmcserverd or wdphotodbmergerd scans, nor DLNA, twonky or iTunes server. No idea of what kind of logging or scans this is…
From another thread, after checking into our favorite routine in the Cloud, monitorio.sh which is the sleep script in gen1 clouds, although I cannot find it running in the new gen2 clouds, I suspect that things don’t change much from one cloud version to another except for the busybox, the scripts and everything else remains similar.
Thus if monitorio.sh is running, there is a background function called file_tally() that I think tally up file sizes across all the directories. This is a low priority background process that is started within Monitorio.sh by using the ampersand after the function name to put it into a background process.
This, I believe, is what has been running on my cloud after the scan is complete.
After copying a bunch of files from my active Cloud to my backup Archive Cloud a few days ago and even though the backup cloud is not remote accessible thereby no scans, I began hearing the slow ticking on my backup cloud also.
The ticking doesn’t affect the ten minute countdown for sleep and without the cron running, the two clouds are now sleeping throughout most of the day when I am not watching movies.
Although I am not a 100% sure that this is the cause, my only worries was that this ticking was a hardware problem. As a software problem, eventually I will find a way to replace monitorio.sh on the new gen2 clouds and this ticking will be removed completely. Until then, this case is closed.
