I’ve had MyCloud turned off for long times because of sleep issues.
I manually power it on whenever I need to do bulk transfers and then power it off + unplug when done.
Can I finally keep it plugged in full time after 3 years of WD updates? ( IS SLEEP FIXED?? ) With the old firmwares, I did not like the daily multiple starts wearing down my harddrive.
I remember RAC and Rapheal doing lots of investigating around ~3 years ago. I see that FOX still has his custom firmware.
I do not need any WD features. The MyCloud is not allowed to access outside internet (blocked at router). If I need cloud features, I VPN into network, and access them “locally”.
Don’t need:
DLNA
Itunes Server
DHCP renew
Firmware Update check
NFS mounts
WDCloud Access
Time Machine
Logs I never read
Thumbnail generation
Drive indexing by file type
Just regular NAS access with LONG sleep. Ideally maybe NTP service can run to update time, but not if it has to wakeup the drive.
Did WD ever fix this? Did Rac or Rapheal find the culprit that we can modify ourselves? Is our only option FOX firmware? I need barebones NAS with long sleep. I remember disabling the index service, thumbnail service, and monitor.sh tally tweak, but that never got full sleep.
Newest listed firmware is v04.05.00-315 on my unit. If not fixed, which fox firmware has fastest speeds? WD Firmware has crazy fast NAS speeds.
Hehehe… Not that it’s not important to you, but I’ve never cared Mine has been powered up since the day it was first available and is still running fine.
I have a 8 year old PC that is powered up 24x7 that also sleeps/wakes the drives and that WD drive is also passing SMART with flying colors.
Yes, harddrives are pretty resilient so even if you are not worried about failure, rate since the drive will outlast your replacement interval, you can thinking about saving a phantom power draw ~5w of power and become less wasteful (greener) to the planet.
I know its not a lot of power or money, but when you multiply it by all the drives out there, we are using a significant chunk of energy unnecessarily. Why should this be the case if I am not using the drive 99% of the time. With more attention to quality/detail we can curb waste and as a bonus save ~$4-5 annually. Look at how well most other electronics implement deep sleep.
Besides the less waste angle I still stand by the fact that lower use = lower wear on the drive, period!
(On the flip side) with this buggy constant spin up and spin down protocol, that this junk has out of the box, I would rather run it 24/7 to extend its reliability, rather than spinning up and down.
This is my last WD product. This is ■■■■ product support and terrible mentality. I am not going to support such practices with my dollar.
But yes you are correct! Each customer has his/her own preferences.
Fixed by WD? No. There are various methods to disable certain modules/features of the My Cloud to get it to sleep more than it does with the stock WD settings. Keep in mind that there are devices on one’s local network that could keep the My Cloud awake in spite of those unofficial mods to try and fix the sleep issues. For example a Windows computer coming out of sleep/hibernation or being booted up may cause the My Cloud to come out of sleep.
Most here are NOT employed by or paid by WD. We are users such as yourself who came to this subforum for one reason or another and have staid to help others. If you want official WD support then contact WD Support via the link(s) at the top of this page.
I’ve tried to solve the sleep issue on my Gen 1 My Cloud too with various degree’s of success using the various unofficial SSH edits mentioned in other discussions on the sleep issue…
That comment wasn’t meant to offend you guys. I know people here have no affiliation with the company.
It was more for the off chance a real WD rep was bored and reading community issues. Yea right…
Anyway, back on topic. I found the RAC’s script that keeps tracks of what files are modified on the MyCloud. With this I can finally see which files may be the culprint.
In the meantime, I will be relocated ALL the log files onto a USB so when it runs low on its RAMDISK, it’ll rotate ontop USB instead of waking up. After a trial run, I am actually planning to send all log files to /dev/null since I never plan on reading them.
As for anything I find after that, I hope I find a work around to achieve a permanent sleep. Any progress made so far is greatly appreciated. I remember monitorIO tweaks, drive remount parameters, and disabling unnecessary services. Anything else found out since then?
Hello, this will be a never ending sleep problem I have a GEN 2 and in the latest version they changed the crontab scripts to improve the sleep time of the drive but still it has a lot os problems. Mine is sleeping and waking a lot per day. I’m planing to also turn off and only turn on when required, but this is not the purpose of this device… hope a next release will have some improvements.
Alternative: Install “loggrotate” tool, move all logs and caches in ram (Samba cache).
Replace Twonky to Minidlna (+ He can update DB only when file changed/added/removed. Twonky scans content via sheduler every 10-20 min)
Move samba’s cache and temp files to ram.
Move all other unnecessary files to ram too or disable/remove these services.
Use Disk I/O monitor tools or just “find” tool with search option “Last access time < 30 min”: find / -ctime -10 (maybe)
I already posted my question (probably a bit too long) in the thread for the respective firm ware but I guess the thread is already too old and got forgotten (Firmware 4.05.00-315 Discussion - #195 by maxshrex).
Does exist a comprehensive guide on what modules need to be disabled and how to do it for a tech novice like me? I found quite a number of posts cluttered in this forum that indicate that disabling certain functionalities when SSHing into the Drive, result in better sleep times but I could not find a guideline that clearly says how to do it and what (potential negative) consequences this has for the overall functionalities. If you know such source in this forum, could you link it for me?
To be more precise on the questions I have after reading through various not connected posts: How do I write a start up script and can I just copy it on the hard drive via file explorer or do I have to use SSH for that part - if so, how? Do I have to make changes to the monitorio functionalty? What negative consequences can occur on disabling the cron jobs as this does not seem to be common sense in the discussion about the sleep issue. Does a start up script have to be re initiated from time to time (does the mycloud disable such script eventually)? Could I still leave twonky and media serving switched on or does that automatically lead to a never sleeping mycloud, even when currently not in use?
I’m not expecting a guaranteed solution for my individual case but rather some kind of orientation from a more experienced user than myself - that I could try and follow as some kind of red line.
There isn’t a comprehensive guide because each person may need different features enabled for their particular usage. The usual warning has to be made, using SSH will potentially void the My Cloud warranty and if incorrect commands are used (like apt-get) one can brick/render unusable their My Cloud. If one doesn’t know how to use SSH they can perform an internet search with to find basic guides on issuing Linux commands via SSH. One also must enable the SSH option within the My Cloud Dashboard Settings section before using SSH.
First one needs to determine how much their first gen My Cloud is sleeping. Using the sleep.awk/sleeptime.sh scripts explained in the following tread:
On the first gen single bay My Cloud one can put commands into the /etc/rc2.d/S98user-start file that get run when the My Cloud boots up. After adding the commands one would restart the My Cloud. Here are the basic commands (below) for the S98user-start file that may help improve 1st gen sleep time. One can find additional commands in various other discussions on the sleep issue. Using WinSCP (WinSCP :: Official Site :: Download) or Putty (https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/) one can edit the S98user-start file to add various commands.
# Move Msg.sock to temporary RAM location
/etc/init.d/samba stop
mount -t tmpfs -o mode=0700,noatime,size=2m tmpfs /etc/samba/msg.sock/
/etc/init.d/samba start
# Stop unwanted wakeups
mount -o remount,noatime,nodiratime /dev/root /
# Stop and disable indexing services (just stopping the service not disable)
/etc/init.d/wdmcserverd stop
/etc/init.d/wdphotodbmergerd stop
# For OS3 firmware only - stop RESTSDK server daemon
/etc/rc2.d/S20restsdk-serverd stop
# Stop Cron
/etc/init.d/cron stop
Yes Samba (SMB) stays active. However, Cron would be stopped (last line of the code). It will be a bit of trial and error to figure out what works best for your needs. Some want to stop Cron, others do not. Just keep in mind that disabling some of the modules/services will impact various features of the My Cloud.
Yes, thank you. The only feature I need, is Twonky media server and the ability to upload files to the drive by selecting the mycloud in the network environment on my PC. I hope that this functionality basically stays intact.
Yes the Twonky media server works, yes remote access works. What may not work with some of those changes is the searching feature when connected remotely and with icons being created for viewing when connecting remotely.
The other thing that may not work properly is the Capacity section of the My Cloud Dashboard. Since I started using a startup script to improve sleep time the Video, Photos, Music Tracks for the Capacity section indicate zero rather than showing a capacity. Doesn’t bother me since I rarely access the Dashboard these days.
No idea. I generally have that line commented out, but left it uncommented so one can experiment. There was past discussion in other threads about disabling cron.
Oh yes, I know these two topics but I found them confusing, as they dont’t flag an agreement on the right approach and I do not understand enough of the whole Linux talk. My question if Samaba would be deactivated actually was initiated by these threads and it also initiated my original question about the monitorio because it was mentioned somewhere.
But thanks for highlighting a possible solution again. I will try and edit these files right on the server as suggested and get back with feedback.
On my gen1 system I made changes to the S98user_start file. My system sleeps 87% of the time. I don’t have cron stopped. The cron job does house cleaning during the day at different times. Like log rotation. Checking for updated firmware. Doing mdadm functions.
This is my /etc/rc2.d/S98user-start file
/etc/rc2.d/S03atop stop
/etc/rc2.d/S20nfs-common stop
/etc/rc2.d/S20nfs-kernel-server stop
/etc/rc2.d/S20restsdk-serverd stop
/etc/rc2.d/S20winbind stop
/etc/rc2.d/S50netatalk stop
/etc/rc2.d/S60mDNSResponder stop
/etc/rc2.d/S61upnp_nas stop
/etc/rc2.d/S85twonky stop
/etc/rc2.d/S85wdmcserverd stop
/etc/rc2.d/S86wdphotodbmergerd stop
/etc/rc2.d/S92wdnotifierd stop
/etc/rc2.d/S95wdAutoMount stop
mount -o remount,noatime,nodiratime /dev/root /
There is no “right” approach. It will all depend on how aggressive you want to get and what features (samba, twonky, remote access, etc) you want to remain active. What works for one user like rac8006’s start file above may not work for the next person. For example rac8006’s script appears to stop Twonky. If one needs Twonky they’d have to skip using that line; /etc/rc2.d/S85twonky stop (and possibly one or more others). Same goes for remote access. It is in some respects, trial and error then lots of testing to see what works best for you and what doesn’t.
I will also mention that various devices on your network will also cause the My Cloud not to sleep for long periods of time. For example if you have any Windows computer with mapped My Cloud Shares that go into sleep mode, they may reconnect to the My Cloud when coming out of sleep mode causing the My Cloud to wake up from sleep.
Thank you both for your help. I managed to get the sleep.ch running after finding the line break that corrupted the file. The sleep times look horrible - a lot of 7 second wake ups :-/
Unfortunately I cannot edit the S98user-start file. The /etc/rc2.d/ ls displays the file name in red and if I try to run it I get a “No such file or directory”
Mine has been powered up since the day it was first available and is still running fine.
