Topic Changed to "Keeping the Two 8TB Clouds"

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

Has it been only 2 years since I bought the 4TB Cloud and 4TB My Book? At that time I bought the pair so that the My Book would mirror the Cloud using manual sync software (Beyond Compare) at monthly intervals or whenever I have time to sync the two.

Last year I started noticing that some users were selling their 4TB clouds and My books at a much cheaper price on Craigslist, thus I managed to buy a couple of extra 4TB Clouds and 4TB My Books; thus I have 3 x 4TB Clouds and 3 x 4TB My Books. Subsequently I have divided all my data into two separate Clouds, photos and ebooks on the ArchiveServer and Movies and Music on the MediaServer. Mac Backups are on the remaining 4TB Cloud and 4TB My Book.

Recently BestBuy had a sale on the 8TB Cloud and My Book. They also had a sale on the 16TB Ex2.

It was very tempting to consolidate all my data back onto one Cloud and one My Book or the possibility of consolidating everything into one 16TB ex2. Once I had consolidated everything, I would then sell all my 4TB clouds and My Books at which I probably would regain the price that I had spent on the new hardware. However, no matter how much I wanted the new hardware, I could not justify the expenditure even though I should regain the cost. The fact remains is that I could no longer trust a single Cloud drive or even a mirrored ex2 Cloud drive.

In the event that single Cloud fails, I would be out of luck with all my data.

Right now, I have three Clouds and three My Books that mirrors the Clouds. In the event that I have a single Cloud failure, I can immediately pull one of the other two clouds into action. Even with two cloud failures, I can daisy chain the USB My Books onto a powered Hub and enlist the last cloud as a NAS for all my USB My Books. Effectively, I have 12TB of storage with multiple options for configuring all 6 drives.

Iā€™ve been tempted by the sale and Iā€™ve spent at least 6 hours toying with adding and subtracting the 8TB cloud to and from my cart. Iā€™ve also toyed with the idea of having a 16TB mirrored EX2 (which was also on sale) of which I never would have to manually sync my files, but then again, how safe will I feel with having all my eggs in one WD Drive? Although since I am on a Mac, I believe that I could pull one of the EX2 drives and simply mount it on my Mac.

The sale is over now and the window of opportunity is gone. Somehow I feel elated as the decision has been removed from my choices but then again, I am sure some time down the road this opportunity will present itself again and then I will, once again, feel the indecisiveness.

I went through this indecision last year with the 6TB Cloud and 6TB my Book and I resisted all temptations. In fact I did buy the pair on New Years day but returned them immediately; unopened.

Your thoughts would be appreciated on my conundrum. Tell me that I should be happy with what I have. :stuck_out_tongue:

2

Funnily enough, the was an item on the radio this morning about Groundhog Day. And then I read your post and thought,ā€œisnā€™t this thread from some time agoā€¦?ā€

Iā€™m not sure thereā€™s a right answer. What you have works; be happy with it. What are you hoping a replacement might do betterā€¦?

3

yeah I think I wrote a thread on the 6tb debating the same :stuck_out_tongue:

why yes! every few years I would replace my iPhones, iPads and macs with newer hardware. This coming late summer I intend to replace my gaming PC with something that will drive either the Vive or Occulus Rift.

The original pair of 4TB cloud and my book, replaced my outdated ā€œraid 5 - PC shuttle serverā€.

It would be nice to go back to just a single Cloud and MyBook or just a single ex2 or mirrored Cloud; clean and efficient as they might say. Right now there is a clutter of 6 adapters on a power bar with wires running everywhere on my bookshelf, plus 3 x cat5e gigabit ethernet cables and a gigabit switch.

There is always the other option to go QNAP and strip the 3x4TB Red drives from the Cloud to create a raid 5 - 12TB server with the 3 MyBooks as backup.

Yes, most definitely a 1st world problem as well as it being a repetitive NAS replacement thing that I tend to revisit every couple of years. Ultimately it would be nice to have 32TB mirrored SSD server but that would be next year problem.

4

So I finally relented and bought an 8TB cloud from Costco at the sale price that Iā€™ve been coveting. Now I just have to wait again for the 8TB My Book to go on sale again.

Although I have been studying extensively the QNap line of NAS devices, one thing that keeps me buying a WD Cloud is the price. For the price of the hard drive itself, you get a NAS. A very basic NAS but that is all you need. The other reason that I keep buying WD Clouds is the form factor; it is the size of a thick book and with book covers, it sit unobtrusively on the book shelf.

Thus to WD, remember the reasons that your customers buys your product.

  1. price
  2. form factor

Keep up the good work.

Now I wonder if WD has fixed sleep on V2 of the Cloud?

5

Although it may seem that Iā€™m paralyzed with indecisions especially when it comes to buying another cloud, I noticed, that when I saw that costco had the 8TB cloud for sale and I jumped out of bed at 1AM in the morning just so I could order one, there were no indecisions or hesitations when the right incentive is given. In fact, I jumped out of bed, a second time, at 2am just so that I could order a second one. I am now waiting for two 8TB clouds from costco.

I have only seen this lower price at a couple of places and they were back ordered. Thus with two "My Clouds at my disposal, I can test My Cloud version 2 till the cows come home.

One of the reason that I was hesitant with buying the 8TB clouds from BestBuy was the fact that once open, I could not return the clouds for a refund. Costco provides me with a 90 day return policy.

I have several requirements from the new 8TB clouds

  1. read/write speeds must be equal or better than my current clouds
  2. the hard drives must be Reds
  3. sleep and scans must be fixable as before unless the new drives donā€™t have this problem.

Iā€™ve been thinking, although I would prefer a USB My Book as my secondary backup device, that having two clouds might be a better choice since if one cloud goes, the second cloud can immediately be brought into service with little change to the network structure.

The USB strategy where I have one Cloud and one matching USB My Book provided me with a fast local drive when connected via USB 3. However I noticed over the 2 years since I had the 4TB matching WD bookends, I never once unhooked the USB drive from the Cloud and the only time I had it unhooked was when I first filled it with data.

Thus perhaps having two clouds might allow me to sell everything (all my 4TB drives versus keeping my USB drives for backup) without feeling too skittish since I have two 8TB clouds that can replace each other. Upgrades can be done without panicking as all cloud owners do when they only have one copy of their data, by upgrading one drive at a time and doing the QA test that WD wants us to do.

The problem of having one cloud and one USB my Book is that if an update goes wrong there goes my Network storage. With the three Clouds that I have now, I was much more relaxed with the upgrades.

It is funny how things works out, especially the fact that I didnā€™t know what I was waiting for until I suddenly saw it.

I know I am rambling to myself on the forum, since nobody seems to be interjecting their thoughts. If you wish for me to continue rambling, such as ā€œhow do the new drives compare to the old cloudsā€, ā€œare the new clouds sleep deprived?ā€, ā€œis there a future for WD?ā€, then post up some remarks below to let me know that my rambling is being appreciated. If not, Iā€™ll just go away quietly.

6

Keep it up. Curious ast how the 8TB gen2 clouds work.

RAC

7

Iā€™m not convinced by what I hear of the Gen2 devices: sound too ā€˜locked downā€™ for me.

8

I willā€¦ cross my fingers that they are hackableā€¦

Tell me more CP, I havenā€™t been around much lately. How locked down are they? no SSH? no scripts? now you got me worriedā€¦ well not that worried since I can return them to costco up to 90 days :stuck_out_tongue:

9

Better get searching the forums for gen2. Busybox, rather than Debian. Different folder structure. No startup script.

10

ok caught upā€¦ apparently it is still linux, smaller subset thus the limitations. As long as I can SSH into the device I should be able to source out what is what, hopefully :stuck_out_tongue: and if the kernel structure is still basically linux then certain services can be killed :stuck_out_tongue:

Iā€™ll figure it all outā€¦ now that Iā€™ve a reason toā€¦ if notā€¦ back it goes to Costcoā€¦

Thanks for the heads upā€¦

11

Not sure if you are aware. But busybox is a program. This program has several linux commands
builtin. Then when you type du you will find a symbolic link to du that points to busybox. A lot of the linux commands are symbolic links to busybox. You can do a busybox --help to get a list of available commands. Busybox is in a lot of the smart devices.

RAC

12

scary stuffā€¦ reminds me of how we use to compile autoexec into an executable.

I use to be a hacker in my past younger life so hopefully with the limited number of commands, it might just be enough to kill off the scans if they are running and anything else that needs killing.

On the other hand, perhaps this new version is really stable without the need to fix anything :stuck_out_tongue:

worse case scenario is that Iā€™ll have to return it to costco and start looking at the QNaps again. Stuffing 3x4TB red into a QNap 451 or 431 will give me a 12TB drive with 8TB useable.

edit: I do have one more option and that is to just rip out the 8TB and stuff them into a QNap 431 since the 8TB clouds are cheaper than a naked 8TB drive.

13

So this is the first time Iā€™ve ordered from Costco and it is almost as bad as ordering from eBay in that my impulsive buying has gone through all 7 stages, although on eBay it is like 2 months of waiting. The 7 stages are excitement after ordering, regret from buying two clouds, sadness that it is taking so long, depression from spending all that money, anger that costco is not open 24/7, frustration that the order is still sitting in Costco after 5 days (long weekend up here in Canada with Canada Day on August 1st), grievance that WD has changed from a great little linux system to some unmodifiable system and denial of the whole WD experience altogether.

Currently it is still sitting in the costco warehouse in Markham, Ontario Canada with a UPS label on it. After UPS picks it up, which will be tomorrow, it will take at least 5 days of travel across Canada, followed by another weekend in which the truck drivers are lounging at some motel waiting for the start of another working day before traveling again. Then it will take another 3 days to from UPS headquarters to schedule a delivery to my house because everyone would be using UPS at this time due to the pending, not really but just a threat, postal strike.

At this moment I am just angry that WD has gone busy box. I am hoping for the best, but at this moment I am really thinking QNap because at least QNap has remained stable over the years. One thing to note here folks is that if your QNap fails, theoretically you can take your hard drives and simply plug them into another new QNAP (any model) and the hard drives will rebuild the raid to fit the new QNap system (it is what Iā€™ve read). Now the reason of going QNap is to unified my 3x4TB into one large drive, thus making it a 12TB raid 5 with 8TB usable. Also raid 5 means that one drive can fail without losing your data so unlike our one drive Cloud where a single drive failure will mean total loss, a single drive failure on a raid 5 Qnap will give you wiggle room if you donā€™t have backup. Of course you should have backup, but this gives you a bit more breathing room then letā€™s say your upgrade your cloud with the latest firmware and yup, your hard drive blinks at you with a red light and you get so angry that you throw your cloud out the window with your backup USB drive still attachedā€¦ you know what I meanā€¦

However I still do have the other option which is just simply stay with what I have since it is still working great and forget the stress of trying out the new cloud.

Too much time to ponder the meaning of all thisā€¦

Iā€™ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
Itā€™s cloud illusions I recall
I really donā€™t know clouds at all

14

sighā€¦ such cute devicesā€¦ it is too bad that they changed the OSā€¦ Now that I have them in my grubby little handsā€¦ I guess Iā€™ll have to test themā€¦

4032Ɨ3024 2.57 MB

15

The busy box method is not all bad. My dlink dns-323 NAS uses busybox. The nice part
of the dlink NAS is that you can hook into the boot process and add your own code. I was able to modify my NAS to use a USB micro sd card as its root. This gives me the ability to add commands that are not in the busybox. I have not found any method on the gen2 to be able to do this. If you google funplug you will find information about its capabilities. It would be nice to be able to do this on the gen 2.

RAC

16

Just looking for a way to kill the scans if neededā€¦ then it will be a keeper else QNap it is.

ok an updateā€¦ that was certainly painlessā€¦

572Ɨ369 56 KB

although I had the feeling that they couldnā€™t venture too far from their terrible WD code roots, I couldnā€™t be too sure until I checked. As you can see under /etc/init.d/ are the handful of services that you will need to stop in order for the Cloud to work (at least in the previous version of the cloud).

wddispatcherd
wdphotodbmergerd
wdmcserverd

even the log filling restsdk-serverd service is here. This service is probably needed for the apps to run.

So at this moment, Iā€™m not too apprehensive and I bet the script that is determine sleep is probably somewhere in those directories.

So it is True that it is no longer a cute true linux box anymore but on the other hand it has become a cute BusyBox that you can probably design some neat little apps that either runs in either some kind of busybox link or in their provided App Cloud interface.

For today, Iā€™ll fill the cloud with stuff and see if it falls asleep in a few days. Plug in a USB hard drive filled with scannable data to see if it locks up the cloud as it did before.

edit. Just found monitorio.sh under /usr/local/sbin/monitorio.sh <== this is the sleeper script that makes your hard drive go to sleep. It is all thereā€¦ now under BusyBox.

17

Alright, on my standard 800MB movie file, I am getting write speeds between 70-80MB/s and read speeds of around 110-122MB/s

Very impressive!! I am giddy with excitement nowā€¦

18

I wonder if the problem with the scanning of files. Could be fixed by setting the process priority very low. This way it will only scan when there is nothing else to do. That shuld stop the problem of not being able to access the system wile it is scanning.

RAC

19

I think that is what they did last year when they tried to fix the scans; i.e. lowered the priority. I donā€™t remember where I saw the lower priorities but I know they did try to lower it of which they believe to be the fix until everybody keeps telling them no but they didnā€™t believe everyone because their cloud was working perfectly.

However there is something more intrinsic to all this and that is deadlocks between two services and scans that donā€™t complete leaving it in limbo forever that could cause lockups (I am not sure about this). The deadlocks occurs when you plug in a full, but not yet scanned USB drive, causing the cloud to lock up. The scans that donā€™t complete is probably on bad movie files that has errors or perhaps a format that the scans has no idea of what it is looking at. Of course, all my thoughts are merely speculations on what I had saw and tried to fix.

Also the scans keeps turning themselves back on, as soon as I turn on cloud accessā€¦ the services re-starts themselves and in I go to stop them again when I start to see that my access is slowing down.

The best way to fix this is to add a scan switch on the menus, so we can choose not to scans and a message will pop up telling us that if we do, we wonā€™t have thumbnails for movies or photos. Iā€™m not sure what else we would lose features on. However this should be user controllable; on or off period. Turn it on before going to bedā€¦ and turn it off the next day when I want to use the drive. Add some new movies, turn it onā€¦ and so forth.

20

Well that was certainly a quick decision from the time that I opened the box with great trepidation and dread of having to figure out ā€œwhat theā€ to the time i finally said ā€œOh wowā€ā€¦ at the end, in just a few short hoursā€¦ I highly endorse this cute little drive, as if anything that I endorse would mean anything.

The thing that won me over, of course this decision could change overnight, is the speed. at 80MB/s writes which is what it is getting at this moment in time because it is copying movies, now remember this is from old Cloud to new Cloud. I have not tested straight writes from flash drive to cloud yet, so the speed could be higher because the old Cloud maxes out at about 80MB/s reads.

The 122MB/s reads from the New Cloud is definite since I copied the file from the cloud to my flash drive.

These are impressive speeds and matches the speed that you will get from a QNap drive. A QNap drive will set you back at $400 minimum with no hard drives, where-as this 8TB cloud is all inclusive NAS and hard drive in one small unit for about the same price as the raw WD 8TB red drives itself without a NAS.

Now the other thing that won me over was the fact that the services that we needed to turn off was left there by the WD programmers as though they knew that someone would go looking for them. They were the services that we needed to stop.

The other thing that I liked was the apps section, of which my old cloud didnā€™t have that, unless it was added recently in the latest firmware update. I have no idea whether there would be any apps that I would add, but it is nice to see it come to fruition since that dreaded OS3 upgrade that WD made us go through last year.

At this point in time, I am using my high speed gaming PC to copy all 3 clouds into 1, which should take a few days. I donā€™t expect any problems since everything is very familiar as even the setup took only a few minutes. Changed Admin to my user name, add my single share, turn on Cloud access and there it was, available in the cloud on my iPhone.

I like it. Same old footprint of a medium size book.

Okā€¦ now I can delete my order for a QNap drive.

oh yeahā€¦ forgot to add, the 8TB drive is a wd80efzx which is a red 8tb helium filled 5400RPM drive.