Hi guys, I’m considering buying a my cloud 2TB after the purchase of WDTV. But after having read lots of horrible reviews on amazon, I’m hesitating now. So can somebody talk about reliability of this product? If being bricked is such a common problem, then I have to avoid and go to buy a standlone nas and a enterprise level hard drive. Thanks.
There is always a learning curve to “ALL” NAS. The ones that you buy for $200-$300 that doesn’t come with a hard drive are usually easier to use because they are really just a NAS and doesn’t pretend to be anything else.
The WD clouds pretends to be user friendly clouds; big fluffy plug and play black box devices but they are not.
They do not brick if you know the reasons why people are bricking them and if there is a rumor that they tend to brick is that people keeps pulling the plug and re-plugging it back in when the white light is blinking; I’ve done that myself after my first upgrade (I pulled the plug at least a dozen times and even did a full reset) before I read from the forum that I should wait. Waited three hours for the white light to stop. The white light stopped.
The reason that you don’t pull the plug is that the Cloud is really a tiny linux box like all the other NAS out on the market. However the other NAS usually have power buttons that does a linux shutdown properly where-as the WD Cloud has no power button fooling you that it is a magic box that plugs and play.
The white light is linux doing a check disk and if you reset, not only does it do a check disk, it also resets the ownership and the read/write rights on every file on your 4TB drive which takes hours.
However if you read the forums and have a bit of understanding of what you are buying into, the WD Cloud is a cheap and wonderful linux box that can out deliver (price to performance) all the other NASes on the market. For the price of a hard drive (when on sale) you get a Cloud for free.
Learn how to Void your warranty by immediately SSH’ing into the device, make a few tweaks and you are all set.
If hacking doesn’t appeal to you, then do look into QNap which has you doing the same things except they won’t void your warranty when you use their system.
The rumors are all true, but it all depends on how you look at them. I for one after making the hacking discoveries have been quite happy with my purchase since 2014 and both my Cloud and MyBook are sitting on the shelf sleeping quietly.
Good luck…
Thanks for your reply, Ralphael. I’m a techie, so learning curve won’t bother me. People on the internet are talking about the source and quality of hard drives that are used for external hard drive and nas of each brand (not only WD), that really worries me. All of us know that hard drive failure is not a disaster, data loss is. If the right way to use will make my cloud product work for several years, I will be very happy.
The one that I bought The Cloud 4TB is a Red drive. The other one the USB My Book drive is a hitachi.
From a quick search of the net, the 2TB seems to indicate that it is also a Red, but you never know if this has changed until you open it up.
Red drives are very reliable as I read a table of drives at use at Google and Seagate was at the bottom where-as WD Reds were towards the top for operating the longest number of hours.
So once again, both of my drives have been working for over a year and a half with no problems; once you apply some modifications. Good cheap system totally worth your investment if you are keen on reading up what you are getting into.
good luck…
Based on my research, my cloud is using green drive, and rumors are saying those drives’ quality is not as same as retail version because some or all of them are refurbushed, repaired, etc. That’s why I’m worrying about the safety of data.
We’ve had this question/assertion before, that MyClouds are using WD Green drives. It turned out the people making these claims were looking at WD MyBookLive boxes, not MyClouds. The conclusion was that MyClouds do use WD Red drives.
If you get a replacement via an RMA, you may get a refurbished unit.
If you buy a new device, you should get a new drive.
Actually I just remember how to check the kind of drives that you have in your brand new Cloud without cracking the case. I had to do it when I first bought it new; just to be sure.
you can use
df
to get a list of all your mounted devices.
then use
hdparm -I /dev/sda4
sda4 should be valid for all Clouds
which then gives you
WDMyCloud:~# hdparm -I /dev/sda4
/dev/sda4:
ATA device, with non-removable media
Model Number: WDC WD40EFRX-68WT0N0
Serial Number: [Deleted]
Firmware Revision: 80.00A80
Transport: Serial, SATA 1.0a, SATA II Extensions, SATA Rev 2.5, SATA Rev 2.6, SATA Rev 3.0
Standards:
Supported: 9 8 7 6 5
Likely used: 9
Configuration:
Logicalmaxcurrent
cylinders1638316383
heads1616
sectors/track6363
.
.
.
a search on the model number WDC WD40EFRX turn up the same model number at newegg…
WD Red WD40EFRX 4TB IntelliPower 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" NAS Internal Hard Drive - Bulk
I haven’t read that thread that cpt_paranoia posted up but I’m fairly sure that “ALL” clouds are “Red” and I think it is included in their spec description too.
This was one of the reason that Sold me on the Cloud 4TB back in January 2014. I was a little disappointed with the hitachi in the My Book 4TB however there are many users that claims the hitachi is better then the Red WD. Since the USB My Book isn’t always on, I’m okay with that.
Personally I wouldnt bother. I have had 2 devices now, both have been a complete nightmare and taken hours of my time tinkering with them, and I mean hours and hours.
I’ve never had more than a day or two without it needing a reboot, falling off the network, using the dashoboard to make a change, like adding a user can take 10 mins or more. Its ridiculous. I’ve sent mine back now after 6 months of messing around and pacifying support. Its a 2/10 from me, if you go ahead, good luck!
On the other hand, I bought another 2TB drive a couple of weeks ago (‘better the devil you know…’ especially when it’s cheaper than buying a 2TB WD Red HDD) and I had it basically configured as a NAS 10 minutes after first applying power.
But then I had spent a very long time learning to drive the thing, and did the setup manually, rather than using WD’s automated setup tool.
As a counter point I had two WD My Cloud devices up and running within 10 minutes of being connected to the local network. I did however read the user guide cover to cover prior to setting both devices up.
As to the OP’s question about reliability. Because its a mechanical device it can fail. Don’t know if there is a hard set of numbers on how reliable the NAS Red drives are. Generally we hear more of the failures than non failures so it can make is seem like a device has a disproportionate number of drive failures when in reality the failure rate could be very low. I’ve had hard drives last 7 to 8 years and I’ve had others fail in 1 year.
The one dead WD My Cloud that I’ve seen failed because it was knocked off a shelf onto a stone floor and the drive got damaged in addition to the white cover being knocked off. Simply swapped out the busted drive with a spare (much smaller) drive I had sitting around and after loading the firmware which took some time, was up and running again within 10 minutes.
I agree, I had nothing but headaches and it’s on going. Never seen a product with so many issues. I bought mint in June and if I were to do it all over again, I would get something else. -Daniel
I never had any issues with mine but I have the older My Book Live, it is currently set to be my torrent client, + i also set remote ssh/scp/sftp access.
It is the backup for 3 phones, 2 laptops and 2 tablets. Using my own scripts for backups though, robocopy/rsync.
It is also my media server from which I stream to all devices mentioned aboved + a FIre TV box with Kodi
I did disable auto firmware upgrades and do it manually when necessary.
I also shut it down via the GUI or command line all the time. A few times the house power has gone out but it has been recovered just fine from it.
Now, this is not my first rodeo. But I remember having plenty of fun with my first ever NAS long long time ago in a galaxy far away.
Hardware wise, unit is fine. Software WD GUI, could be better. If you are a techie and willing to learn or already know some basic Linux, it is a lot of fun.
Mainly, it is a learning curve most people dont want to put up with, specially if it is their first ever NAS. But once you learn it, since most NAS regardless of brand are a some light flavor of Linux, you know what to look for and/or are getting into.
And last, for the price, it is the best NAS ever.
ADDED:
This seems like a very interesting option:
http://community.wd.com/t5/WD-My-Cloud/Clean-debian-and-OpenMediaVault-on-WDMyCloud/td-p/785505
