Is mine broken, or do they all have problems?

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud EX4
1

Hi everybody,

I’m having serious issues with my EX4, both performance and reliability.

To start with, I have the EX4 configured with raid 5, running 4 4TB drives. It’s connected to any given machine over dual 1Gb/s cat 6 ethernet cables, firmware version 2.11.140. Everything that can be disabled is disabled, it’s sitting there as a dumb raid device with no cloud access and no media servers, ftp server, itunes server, etc… The only thing that’s not disabled is the web interface.

Problem 1: The file transfers for large and small files is horribly slow, talking 1.5MB/s to 4MB/s (write/read) for text, video, picture files. That speed will bump up to 2 / 6 for large single archive files. I’ve disabled just about everything that can be disabled to try and increase the speed, it’s helped but as you can see, not by much.

Problem 2: Encrypted sparsebundle DMGs…trying to transfer files is near impossible. I have (had) an encrypted DMG on the EX4, mounted to a machine over the above stated connection and was getting transfer speeds of 10-15 KB/s…as if we were back in the early 1990s. What gives? They claim this is a TimeMachine backup device, well how could that be possible when time machine uses encrypted sparsebundle DMGs and you can only write at 10KB/s?

Problem 3: Mounting USB drives to the back, once mounted the button to turn off “media serving” is greyed out and stuck in the “on” position, which is counter to what I want. Performing a “copy” backup from a EX4 directory to a directory on the mounted USB drive is impossible since it claims the drive directory is read-only (verified that it’s not). However if I turn on “public access” for the mounted drive it suddenly works, thanks for the security problem…

Problem 4: Security policies (haha), newly connected drives are mounted as public by default, newly created stores are public by default, and give permission to all users to R/W. Connect a drive and anybody can see it, great plan.

Problem 5: Changing settings on the web interface sits with the “Updating” message for hours on end and never updates a single setting.

Obviously I’m a bit baffled how this thing is selling. I don’t understand how people are putting up with these kind of write / read speeds (given all the posts these issues don’t seem to be limited to me). Writing to an old (6+ years) USB HDD that’s connected to a switch through a hacked together ethernet → USB adapter gets 100MB/s throughput for read and write, ■■■■ close to the absolute max for both the HDD and the cat 6 connection.

Before I yank out the HDDs and melt this thing down is there anyway to fix it and get reasonable R/W speeds and reliable USB drive connections (a responsive web interface would be nice too)?

2

Edit never mind on the fix, the thing won’t even shutdown anymore, I’m done with it.

3

Hello, I would suggest you to contact support and see if they can assist with anything.

4

Just thought I’d give a bit of an update, tried backing up a few more times and it kept failing. Manually copied the files to backup drives (slowly).

Ordered a TerraMaster USB3.0 DAS RAID enclosure last night with next day delivery. Popped the WD HDDs into it, plugged it into the back of my switch and wow, just wow, it’s unbelievable how bad the WD product is. Almost 1Gb/s write, 1Gb/s read over local network for the TerraMaster.

My suggestion to everybody who doesn’t rely on WD software for network access: pull out the drives, sell the enclosure for whatever you think it’s worth, and put the drives into a DAS with a customized network setup and live happily. Local network access is no harder to setup than with a NAS assuming your router/switch has a USB port and supports connected HDDs. External network access is a bit tricky but very doable if you have an extra computer laying around that you can mount/map the drives to (or a desktop that lives at your house/office), then it’s just a matter of port forwarding and knowing your home IP or using something like DNSexit to map a dynamic IP to your system. If anybody is interested I’m selling the EX4 enclosure on ebay, starting at $0.01 + shipping as that’s all I think it’s worth.

5

It’s not so much the box as it is the choice of ‘useful’ applications they put on it. The Twonky program (I think) is the culprit as it does some sort of scan/index/catalog of every file on the device, meanwhile consuming ever last tick of the CPU and leaving none for data transfers.

Go watch the movie ‘The Twonky’. It’s about a posessed electronic box (TV-like) that is supposed to be helpful but ends up taking over its owner’s life, eventually threatening to kill him. See a parallel here?

6

I would have agreed with you if I hadn’t already disabled all of the services provided by WD. It’s just a dumb linux box right now and still unbelievably slow. The unit is totally underpowered to run in RAID 5, specially with smaller files. Arguments against RAID5 aside, it comes as the default raid on this so I would have fully expected it to work properly.

Like I said, I’ve moved onto a new box and am getting full 140MB/s write speed for large movie files and 75+MB/s for smaller image and text files (USB Connection, and 105MB/s 75MB/s over 1Gb/s cat 6), running in RAID 5 using the same drives that came in the WD EX4.

The WD unit is very disappointing compared to similarly priced units from other manufactures. When you add in the fact that firmware updates are deleting peoples data, the software they provided (twonky et al.) is horribly unoptimized and full of bugs, and the lax security policies I’m surprised people are still buying the product.

On top of that, which may be useful to others, I’ve recently found out that running backups from the EX4 to attached HDDs are less than reliable. After shutting the unit down and plugging the backups into a mac and windows machine I was greeted with a corrupt FS message, the drives opened in Read-only mode, and there are copies of random files scattered all over the place. My data was relatively intact but had to be manually and carefully re-sorted and re-copied. I’m completely baffled how it’s possible for a hard drive and data company to screw up the rsync command.