Disk standby and (or) shutting down WD My Cloud

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
1

Hi guys.

Just got my new WD My Cloud with 3TB and so far everything seems to be working fine, fast and reliable ony all my devices.

One thing is bothering me though:
Although I turned drive standby on in the settings, the drive never actually goes to standby mode! It’s just constantly spinning. Quite annoying and loud in my studio apartment - the WD My Cloud is in the same room in which I sleep. Even if I shutdown my computer and all connected devices the drive keeps spinning. Cloud functionality is currently on but I’m willing to turn it off in case that mind help somehow.

I could live with that if I just had the possibility to manually shut down the device. Googling I found out that in older firmwares there actually seemed to have been a button in the dashboard to shut it down completely. All I have right now is a restart button. I assume just disconnecting it from power supply would be a solution but that is very uncomfortable and probably also not healthy while the drive is spinning.

Devices I use with WD My Cloud:

  • MacBook (latest OS) and i use it with Time Machine, BUT automati backups are off.
  • iPhone (latest OS)
  • Nexus 10 Android Tablet (Android 5)

The WD My Cloud, of course, is running the latest firmware as well.

Another thing I see sometimes: although I have LED turned off the LED randomly goes on again.

ANY suggetions very much appreciated

2

First, which firmware version are you using? V4.x or V2.x?

There are several recent threads that discuss how to shutdown the My Cloud. It appears the v2.x firmware is missing the “shutdown” option as discussed in the following threads.

http://wdstagingsplit.staged-by-discourse.com/t/cannot-find-power-off-button-in-dashboard-v2-11-133/151868

http://wdstagingsplit.staged-by-discourse.com/t/safe-shutdown/147307

Second there are numerous threads discussing the “sleep” issue with the My Cloud where the drive doesn’t go into sleep mode or is continually waking up so the firmware can perform actions. You can do a search using the forum search feature to find other threads on the sleep issue, here are several recent threads on the sleep issue with some possible workarounds to get the My Cloud to sleep.

http://wdstagingsplit.staged-by-discourse.com/t/wd-my-cloud-randomly-wakes-up-the-drive-when-drive-sleep-is-enabled/152748

http://wdstagingsplit.staged-by-discourse.com/t/sleep-time/95608

3

Thanks, Bennor. I tried using the forum search but I didn’t find any recent results.

Also I didn’t know there was a V4.x F/W - I simply updated the F/W using the Dashboard! Is this due to different generations of the device?

Thanks!

4

The v2.x version single bay My Cloud’s are newer and have slightly different hardware than the older v4.x version My Clouds. There are some threads that discuss the differences…

http://wdstagingsplit.staged-by-discourse.com/t/fw-versions/148668

http://wdstagingsplit.staged-by-discourse.com/t/latest-my-cloud-mirror-firmware-pre-installed-on-brand-new-my-cloud/145284