I feel your pain…
This is a community of WD customers, who try to help each other out, and ease the pain. I’m not sure if there are any WD employees on this forum; if there are, they keep very quiet… Basically, it’s a way of doing support on the cheap, by getting your customers to feel part of a ‘community’, helping each other out; that’s what real communities do. IMHO, this is a cynical, money-saving exploitation of goodwill.
I think the User Manual is a shambles, as it is poorly structured, and encourages the download of all sorts of unnecessary software to get the MC going, and access it. I’m pretty sure that all control can be done via the browser-based Dashboard, and all local access to the drive can be achieved by mapping the drive into your OS; the various apps are only needed for remote, ‘cloud’ access. Oh, and, as you say, the manual doesn’t mention or interpret errors messages, or how to recover from them.
Given what I feel is the shoddy nature of the firmware, I have no intention of using the cloud services, as well as the fact that all such access has to go via WD’s servers, rather than connecting directly to my MC device. Put simply, given the number of problems I’ve experienced, and that pour onto these forums, I don’t trust their systems to maintain data security.
Fortunately, I paid little more than the price of an equivalent-sized USB HDD, so using the MC purely as a local, media-serving NAS isn’t so bad. Having said that, I’m currently playing with a £35 Android media box, and a USB HDD that, running BubbleUPnP as a media server/player, and DroidNAS as a file server, seems to do pretty much the same thing, as well as providing me with a nice little email/web browser and low-power computing solution, connected to the TV in my living room. And I have access to the entire range of Android apps to run on it…
