I thought I’d plug in a USB drive and see. I thought it wise to find out how to safely eject it first, so I went to the user manual index and looked up ‘USB’. No entry for USB ejection. There’s ‘Ejecting A USB Storage Device (Windows)’ on p39, but it’s unclear whether this is for devices plugged into the PC, or devices plugged into the MyCloud.
Since I wasn’t sure whether I’d be able to eject safely, I dug out an old 1GB USB stick, plugged in a simple hub, then plugged the USB stick into the hub. The dashboard went unavailable, then returned and needed a log in. When the status re-appeared, the USB icon was now illuminated. Clicking on that shows a USB DISK 2.0 device, with capacity details, but the volume name isn’t shown. There was a funny little icon in the bottom left of the pop-up panel; a triangle over a bar. I clicked this, and an ejection pop-up appeared. Right; now I know how to eject a USB drive from the Dashboard. It would be nice if that were included in Section 13 ‘Connecting a USB Hard Drive’ of the User Manual. And in the index.
So, I SSH in, and look around. And there, in the /shares folder, is the USB stick volume name.
I copied the entire stick to /shares/Public, timing the operation:
cd /shares/Volume
date; cp -R * /shares/Public/usb; date
Result: 1’07" for 732MB, 1019 files, 68 folders; 10.9MB/s
Okay, it’s a Flash memory stick, not a HDD.
Eject worked eventually, although no ‘it is safe to unplug’ message appeared; it just dropped back to the Dashboard, with the USB icon now dark.
Now to get adventurous…
I plugged in a USB3 500GB Toshiba portable drive. Again, the Dashboard went down with an error report, then came back up, needing a log in, and, once status re-appeared, it showed a USB icon. Clicking this showed the disk correctly identified as a 500GB Toshiba External USB 3.0 drive.
Back to SSH, and see the volume name under /shares
This drive had a lot of media on it, that might be a more useful test. So I choose to copy a bunch of videos. Same timed process as above.
Result: 1’37" for 304MB, 23 files. That’s 3.13MB/s
Not as many videos as I thought; they’re all small clips.
Let’s try something a bit meatier; 10.3GB of music files:
Result: 50’35". That’s 3.4MB/s.
It doesn’t look good… But at least I now know where the USB disks appear in the filing system, and how to eject them…
