WD Tightens Focus On Home Personal Clouds

[LinAdmin]

After reading the announcement in SNB I recently bought a My Cloud 3TB and yes, it worked out of the box, but the design is badly flawed:

a) The drive never goes into power saving mode. This means that it runs 24 hours per day continuously consuming 11W! Acceptable would be "non spinning drive" with 5W.

b) To compensate for that situation, the drive head gets unloaded after 8 seconds of inactivity. This is due to the famous head unload story of WD green drives.

In the few days the box is running, it reached a head load count above 6000 and it is easy to calculate when the drive will reach end of life according to its specification.

In the WD forum you can read many complaints about the two firmware updates from past months.

Any users of WD Cloud in this forum?

 

[stevech]

After reading the announcement in SNB I recently bought a My Cloud 3TB and yes, it worked out of the box, but the design is badly flawed:

a) The drive never goes into power saving mode. This means that it runs 24 hours per day continuously consuming 11W! Acceptable would be "non spinning drive" with 5W.

b) To compensate for that situation, the drive head gets unloaded after 8 seconds of inactivity. This is due to the famous head unload story of WD green drives.

In the few days the box is running, it reached a head load count above 6000 and it is easy to calculate when the drive will reach end of life according to its specification.

In the WD forum you can read many complaints about the two firmware updates from past months.

Any users of WD Cloud in this forum?

Frequent advise on this forum is to stick with Synology or QNAP, maybe Thecus.

 

[sinshiva]

damn, you're picky. the device should go into an idle state/spin down the drive, but i'd hardly complain about 11w lol.

 

[stevech]

My DS212 is config'd to automatically power off between midnight and 7AM.

 

[LinAdmin]

damn, you're picky. the device should go into an idle state/spin down the drive, but i'd hardly complain about 11w lol.

I might laugh about you not seeing that it is not only a question of unnecessary power consumption (I know that in the US most people do not care ; ).

It is also aging of the drive which has a limited number of hours (mtbf).
Bingo?

 

[sinshiva]

like i said, i agree that the device should spin down a drive, i'm all about preserving electric motors. and i've moved twice in the last 3 years; each time i've replaced every lightbulb, everywhere, with compact fluroescents. i dream of affordable AND good LED replacements.


still, 11w is one lightbulb to me. and a fraction of a lightbulb for many others

 

[thiggins]

Any users of WD Cloud in this forum?

I don't have a WD MyCloud, but a MyBook Live that has been in service for at least two years.

My only complaint is that the remote web interface (wd2go.com) uses Java.

Hard disk sleep is enabled and works. The most recent firmware update for some reason extinguished the front panel light.

 

[LinAdmin]

like i said, i agree that the device should spin down a drive, i'm all about preserving electric motors. [...]
still, 11w is one lightbulb to me. and a fraction of a lightbulb for many others

24×365×11W=96KWh per year. Multiply by households in USA and think about it?

 

[LinAdmin]

I don't have a WD MyCloud, but a MyBook Live that has been in service for at least two years.

My only complaint is that the remote web interface (wd2go.com) uses Java.

Hard disk sleep is enabled and works. The most recent firmware update for some reason extinguished the front panel light.

The software of WD MyBook was considerably more mature than for the cloud.

 

[sinshiva]

24×365×11W=96KWh per year. Multiply by households in USA and think about it?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-...-with-record-power-price-premiums-energy.html

Spot Boston on-peak power gained 70 percent from last winter, averaging $96.71 a megawatt-hour Nov. 1 through yesterday, the grid data show. New York City rose 49 percent to $77.82. The $18.89 premium is the most for the period in data going back to 2005.

96.71/1000= 0.09671 * ((8765.81 * 11)/1000) = $9.32/year per device

 

[LinAdmin]

WD MyCloud is a nightmare

Waiting patiently a few months for a firmware without too many bugs I have lost any confidence in WD's capabilities regarding software.

Several firmware releases in the past months without any visible progress make me think that they do not want or are not sufficiently competent.

The way they handle bug reports, the behavior of their support in the forum etc. are incredibly lousy. Customers who have paid and ask too loud for a working software get banned and their posts deleted.

What do readers of this forum suggest to be done?
Any reasonable idea is highly appreciated!

 

[stevech]

You're stuck with WD's business model: Sell Hardware!