WD EX4 NAS lost connection while xfer of files

First. I am away from my home. So I cannot look at the device right now.

I was RDP into my home WIN 8 machine, transfering files from one network share drive on a WIN7 machine onto my EX4 NAS device. I have had this device running for about a week with NO issues at all. 

I came back to check on the xfer, and the device was not accessable. All of the drives have red “X” and the Device is not accessable by web page control.

I CAN ping it successfully, but FTP and HTTP fails to connect.

I was xfering a large amount of information ( a folder with 65GB of information large files about 1-3GB each ) 

I know there will be more information needed, and I will provide it later… what I wonder is, if I can PING it is there a command I can send it to reboot? Or am I stuck until I get home?

OK, home now…

All the displays are normal, IP address same as it was. It says healthy, shows the storage free,  all normal.

Any helpful ideas? This is my second unit, as the first one failed the second day I had it. I don’t want to do anything to break it.

OK, spent an hour on the phone with tech support. Ended up restarting the device, and now it is working again.

They took some scans of my network and data logs, but nothing seemed to be wrong. So… I hope this is not a re occuring issue. This NAS is supposed to hold my important data and be reliable. How can I put my trust in a device that may or may not fail when I need it the most?

Anyway… it is working now, and it needed to be restarted to establish communications. 

“I CAN ping it successfully, but FTP and HTTP fails to connect.”


When that happened, do you know what the exact error message was?

Did you see getting a “500 Internal server error” message during your troubleshooting efforts?

I saw no errors at all. When connecting to the control panel ( web page of NAS ) it just kept loading with a blank page. PING was returned successfully, but FTP was “closed by remote host”

After an hour with WD support, we determined no network issues. Removed power to NAS, rebooted the NAS and it came back. 

Only recommendation they had was to move the NAS to my router, as it is behind a 1GIG Networked switch, but this seems ridiculous to me, as a NAS should be able to handle a home network.

So… rebooting it caused it to re-establish communications, with NO ALTERATION to my home network. This and the fact that the first unit I had would lock up on the control panel when attempting to build a RAID, leads me to believe there may be an issue with the devices networking interface. Maybe a firmware upgrade will fix this. Since the engineers have the first unit and the data they pulled from my interaction online, I hope they come up with a solution. I am not satisfied with a NAS that has to be restarted every week.

Thanks for the update.

I also got the issue with connecting to the dashboard, when logging in - after entering password, I got a blank page.

Instead of closing the browser and retrying, I clicked the “refresh” button on the browser toolbar. At that point, it gave http error 500.

I’m guesseing the similar issue would have prevented the ftp access, but I did not try.

It has caused this problem for me twice in about a week. Requires pressing the power button on the device for 10 seconds to power it down and then restart to gain access.

Not a pretty picture when there are some active data copy processes going on that have to be interrupted just due to this.