For the 1st gen My Cloud, yes the firmware is on the hard drive. I assume the same is true for 2nd bay My Cloud units.
My understanding with how a Quick Restore and Full Restore works is they don’t actually erase the whole whole hard drive. Instead they both just erase the user data on the one partition that holds the user data.
That’s why I suggested earlier that you erase/delete all partitions on the hard drive and rebuild it. That is the only way to ensure no remains of the firmware or mods/apps remain within the firmware.
You can do a search through this subforum to find various discussions on the way the firmware works on the 2nd gen My Cloud units. Particularly how changes a user makes may not be retained when one reboots the 2nd gen My Cloud.
