Truly awful

My Cloud Home - Personal Cloud Storage My Cloud Home
1

This product is truly awful. Another ■■■■■■ who bought before reading enough actual customer reviews, not just the tech websites… I am stuck with it as I am unable to sell it locally or on eBay. Seems everyone is smarter than I was.

What I want to know is:

Can I remove the HDD to repurpose in a Synology NAS? I want to be able to format it and use how I see fit, outside of WD’s ridiculous little setup. WD customer support claims not recommended and it won’t work.

Has anyone done it? Cheers for any help!

2

WD customer support most probably don’t recommend it as it void the warranty and you won’t be able to access your data on it.

At the end of the day … it’s just a hard drive in the enclosure which you can remove and reformat to use however you want.

I’ve disassembled my Gen 1 My Cloud and removed the hard drive to see if i could quickly copy files to it connected directly to my PC motherboard.

It’s a Standard RED WD Hard drive … but Windows 7 prompted me to format it because My Cloud Hard Drives are formatted EXT4 (Linux Format)

If i proceeded to format it … then sure, i could use it just fine on my PC (but lose all my data on the hard drive after the format)

If you decide to do it … make sure you have a backup of all your data.

3

Hey, cheers for the reply.

Oh yeah, you’re not wrong. I know why they are saying it, I just want to know if I can! I have no data on it, I tried to use it but after hours of pure frustration I gave up and just did a hard reset.

Was the one you disassembled a My Cloud Home? Afaik, MCH and the original My Cloud are quite different products. I would hope that it’s just a bog-standard WD Red inside - I can’t remember where I saw it, but I’m under the impression the drive is kinda locked down with some proprietary bs…? Maybe all that just comes from the os/board inside the enclosure though, and removed, it would perform as any other external hdd.

4

I Googled … WD My Cloud Home disassembly and found the video below

Once you remove it from the enclosure and remove the interface board … it looks like a bog standard WD Red with bog standard Sata connection and power socket.

video is not in english … but skip to around the 6:10 mark