Yes, I’m that guy… and that was on the WD Live device. It would be clicking away inside my closet and I didn’t know what it was doing until I finally investigated.
Today I got the same 8tb cloud as you have now, in fact two of them.
edit: Actually I have the 8TB single drive Cloud so I have no idea if the script would work on a 8TB mirror but you can always give it a try.
Now the indexing is not as bad as the gen1 devices although they may have fixed gen1 with the latest firmware, but since you have a gen2 we won’t discuss gen1 anymore. I discover from another recent post that it may not be a WD fix that improved the scans but rather the larger memory of 512k on gen2 vs 256 on gen1.
Thus you can wait for the scans to complete without too much problems other than slow dashboard. Regular access like watching movies should be just fine.
I am in the same boat. When I got my 8TB drives, I filled it up to the brim with files and I could hear and feel the heaviness of the drive as it tries to index everything. I decided to let it scan and it took about a week but for some reason after the scans were done, it still clicked every 2 seconds and while it did go to sleep, the cron would wake the device up at least 4 times a day and in the middle of the night (3am to check for updates even if you told it not to) the drive was awake; clicking every 2 seconds. When I got up in the morning, the drive was awake at 8AM. At lunch it woke itself up again. One more time at 3PM. It was annoying and frustrating even though my drive was across the room, I can hear the clicks.
So I gave up…
In the end I decided to turn everything off so the drive can sleep when not accessing…
here is my script for turning everything off.
#!/bin/bash
/etc/init.d/wdphotodbmergerd stop
/etc/init.d/wdmcserverd stop
/etc/init.d/wdnotifierd stop
/etc/init.d/wddispatcherd stop
killall crond
drive_sleep.sh off
sleep 1
drive_sleep.sh on
hd_standby.sh 5
Make sure to turn on sleep from the dashboard before running this script.
Run this script after turning on your Cloud access even if you had ran it before turning on cloud access. It is a constant fight with the OS now because it starts up the scans every time you start up Cloud access, or turning on or off Cron and so on. For some reason WD turns the scans back on when you are not looking.
So just run the script whenever you make any changes to the dashboard. I do have Cloud access on for my Cloud drives so I can access it on the road. You can actually turn on Cloud access just by accessing it from the Cloud app but you have to be on Wifi to do this. Once you do this, run the script again to turn off the scans. You will still have cloud access but you won’t have thumbnails which is okay… really… because half the time you won’t get thumbnails anyways even with the scans and the reason is … just because its a WD App.
Once in awhile, I would turn off sleep so I can watch movies without the drive going to sleep. Don’t run the script when you do this. However once you are done with movie night, you can then turn on sleep from the dashboard, then SSH into the device and navigate through
cd /shares//Scripts <===Scripts is the directory that I store the above script.
./go8tb.sh <== go8tb.sh is what I named the above script. Be sure to use the period to indicate the current directory.
When index is not running…
On gigabit ethernet, you should get between 80 to 100MB/s and that is Megabytes, not megabits. In other words 10 to 15 seconds to transfer a 800MB-1GB file.
On wifi AC, mine is with an Airport Extreme, I get approximately 40MB/s writes and reads.
on just standard Wifi, I get about 9 to 10MB/s read and writes.
With index running, I get about half the speed but at least the drive isn’t locked like my 4TB gen1 device.
If I remember correctly, as soon as I turned on media access or something like that, you can feel the whole drive bog down. So before you wait patiently for all the scans to complete, figure out if you really need what you are asking for, like DLNA. You definitely do not need the iTunes Server because if you drag all the music files into iTunes, it just picks up the links to your Cloud without the need for your Cloud to scan every media file to check if it is a MP3 file or not (I swear the WD scaners must be reading all your emails as well as reading every ebook you have and perhaps looking at every JPG stored on your drive.)
Recently I just found the VLC app for my Apple TV gen2 and it can access the Cloud drive without any type of index and it plays all the media files found on my Cloud.
I am just stoked at finally being able to remove my Mac Mini as the intermediary media server.
I wish you luck in whichever direction you choose. I don’t do WD’s tech support anymore but the guys like @Bennor and @cpt_paranoia does a great job in doing WD tech support without pay.
