Western Digital My Cloud Mirror alternatives

roytom2

I’ve been driven absolutely mad by the Western Digital My Cloud Mirror, generation 2 6GB model. I think it’s about 4 years old.
Access to it from either home or a remote location has always been extremely flaky. But now I’m totally unable to login to the Admin of the box as the connection always times out. I’ve been repeatedly pestered to upgrade to version five for their operating system for this NAS box but this isn’t possible as I can’t login.  As instructed I’ve tried resetting the box but this doesn’t make any difference. Western Digital support is pretty ropey.
Therefore I now need an alternative NAS server. Any suggestions?
Thanks

forgotmyname

I had a DLink NAS and it was a pain setting anything and had similar connection issues outside the home. The only
reliable thing was my phones camera taking a picture and uploading a backup to the NAS. That worked well but trying
to consume media from it was a nightmare. All the apps seemed to be 3rd party ones.

Finally decided to spend the money on a Synology NAS and fingers crossed its reliable and just works. I can stream a
movie and actually get to watch the whole thing and not get an error just before it ends.

[Deleted User]

Synology and QNAP seem to be the top brands for home NAS.

I got a QNAP this summer after being a WD MyCloud user for a decade and I've not regretted it, although it has cost 2 arms and 1 leg I'm really happy with it.

But I don't use any of their added software - just a pure NAS with no cloud / remote access enabled for security reasons - both QNAP and Synology have been hit by ransomware (as has WD) and I won't trust my data being exposed to the web 

Depending on what you want to share, there are more secure ways. My photos, videos and music is shared via Plex running on a different server. Documents and files are sync'd to Google drive.

Movaraks

have you written to technical support?

roytom2

thanks for the help
After unplugging the WD box for 10 minutes and then reconnecting it I can now access the box’s Dashboard but it’s terribly slow.
But I still cannot gain access to my files on two laptops and we’ve resigned ourselves to accessing one account on a third laptop and then copying everything off it onto usb hard drives for now. What’s strange is access via an iPad seems to work better than a Windows 8.1, 10 or 11 laptop.

After that this idiotic piece of rubbish can go in the bin. It’s just a pity it has two 3tb hard drives in it. Could these be used for something else?

[Deleted User]

It could be that the drives themselves are failing leading to the slow performance.

I've always found the performance of the WD devices dreadful, especially with a lot of files stored on them. 

You could try repurposing the drives, would be worth putting them in a caddy and checking the SMART data to see what the health of them is like.

Whatever you do, make sure you have at least 1 backup of everything, preferably 2.

forgotmyname

I had a WD Red drive in my old DLink NAS and the performance tanked. It was dreadful afterwards.  4TB drive took
almost 24 hours to install where the other 4TB drives took just an hour or two.

It totally killed the performance of the NAS, I sent it back and news broke a while later they were using SMR drives
without telling anyone.  Why do they do this? People will find out and it never ends well.

[Deleted User]

forgotmyname said:

I had a WD Red drive in my old DLink NAS and the performance tanked. It was dreadful afterwards.  4TB drive took
almost 24 hours to install where the other 4TB drives took just an hour or two.

It totally killed the performance of the NAS, I sent it back and news broke a while later they were using SMR drives
without telling anyone.  Why do they do this? People will find out and it never ends well.

There was a class action lawsuit in the US over this, owners got a couple of dollars rebate for their inconvenience.

Profit above quality that massively backfired I guess. I'm stuck with 4x4TB SMR's but thankfully they perform well for my purposes but I know when the day comes that one of the disk fails and I need to do a RAID rebuild, I'll be replacing with non-SMR drives.

forgotmyname

I bought 8TB external drives for my Synology. Spotted some thread on a random forum where people posted what
drives were in the enclosures and found a great deal on some Iron Wolf 8TB NAS drives, stripped them out and
fitted to my NAS.

Quite a bit cheaper than buying internal drives. Although there was a risk that the enclosures I received may have
had different drives in them.

roytom2

I’ve now bought a Synology NAS box that came with 2 hard drives and it’s working well. It’s the entry level model DS220j. So far so good.

I’ve also now be able to copy (using windows drive mapping) all the files off the WD Mycloud Mirror onto usb hard drives (this took about a week) and I’m now copying the files from the WD to the Synology box.

But WD never fails to disappoint as the constantly plugged OS5 for the WD isn’t available as showing on the admin dashboard as it’s supposed to - yes the firmware is up to date. They offer no explanation for this. As it turns out this has proved a luck escape as upgrading to their OS5 would render their Smartware backup unusable. We have been dependent on Smartware when laptops have gone west so this is utterly ridiculous. WD seem to despise their customers.

[Deleted User]

roytom2 said:

I’ve now bought a Synology NAS box that came with 2 hard drives and it’s working well. It’s the entry level model DS220j. So far so good.

I’ve also now be able to copy (using windows drive mapping) all the files off the WD Mycloud Mirror onto usb hard drives (this took about a week) and I’m now copying the files from the WD to the Synology box.

But WD never fails to disappoint as the constantly plugged OS5 for the WD isn’t available as showing on the admin dashboard as it’s supposed to - yes the firmware is up to date. They offer no explanation for this. As it turns out this has proved a luck escape as upgrading to their OS5 would render their Smartware backup unusable. We have been dependent on Smartware when laptops have gone west so this is utterly ridiculous. WD seem to despise their customers.

Great choice with Synology, I too ended up moving away from WD after many years of watching their NAS devices decline.

Your Synology NAS should be able to find the WD on the network and you can connect directly for file transfers through your network initiated by the Synology if you wish but looks like you've copied everything across anyway now.

By the sound of things you don't have a backup of this data, I'm only guessing from the fact you had to copy everything off the WD to something else and then on to the Synology - so my advice is to have everything on the Synology backed up on to another device and don't wait either.

You could use the old WD as your backup (but block internet access) or use some of the cloud backup services that Synology natively connects to - either way it will be a breeze with the Synology because you can schedule automatic backups.

I see your old WD was the mirror and maybe you had it in RAID1 mirror mode so you have two copies, one on each disk. And maybe your new Synology is the same, but I hate to break the news but RAID is not a backup, it just provides high availability in the event of disk failure.

The reason RAID1 is not a backup is because if you delete a file, lose them through malware or get all your files encrypted by ransomware, then RAID1 mirror does the same damage to both copies.

Finally for security keep your Synology device up to date with the latest firmware updates, remove any apps you don't need and disable cloud access unless you need it. Synology were hit with some nasty ransomware this year and a couple of years ago.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/synology-warns-of-malware-infecting-nas-devices-with-ransomware/

https://blog.knowbe4.com/bid/393432/cryptolocker-ransomware-variant-hits-synology-users-synolocker

https://www.zdnet.com/article/ransomware-crooks-hit-synology-nas-devices-with-brute-force-password-attacks/

Also follow good practice and use 2FA, disable the default admin account, guest access and of course a complex password and run the built in security advisor and follow the advice on that.