Western Digital MyCloud NAS devices are popular in Ireland for their ease of setup, user-friendly OS. And unlike most NAS ranges from other manufacturers, the disks come pre-installed. This is probably not surprising given that WD (unlike Synology, Buffalo, Netgear et al.) manufacture hard disks.
The entry-level models in the WD MyCloud NAS range does not offer any redundancy – they are single-bay only. However, they do come with a USB 3.0 port for external backup which is better than nothing. Models further upstream in the range such as the MyCloud Mirror, MyCloud Gen 2, MyCloud EX2 and MyCloud EX4 offer mirroring with the more advanced models offering RAID 5 and RAID 10 redundancy.
Recently, we helped a customer with an entry-level WD MyCloud which was no longer showing up on his network. He could hear it spinning. But no data appeared when he logged into MyCloud OS. So, he updated the device’s OS to version 3. He removed the 4TB disk from its casing and attached it via USB dock to his Apple Mac. But no volume showed up. He ran some DIY data recovery software on it – but that too proved unfruitful.
He brought the disk (a WD40EFRX NASware 3.0 disk) to us. These “WD Red” (as they are commonly known) are generally reliable disks. A unique feature of them is their disk-to-parking zone timings. Because they are designed for NAS usage their heads will not retreat to the disk’s parking zone until 300 seconds of inactivity compared to 8 seconds for a model from the “WD Green” range.
Our diagnostics revealed several of the firmware adaptive modules were corrupt. These modules are essential in “tuning” the disk heads to the disk platters and are used for the management of disk errors. Secondly, the disk had well over 12000 bad sectors.
The data recovery process went smoothly without any surprises. Over 3.2TB of ORF (Olympus Raw), PSD (Adobe PhotoShop) and .MOV files were all successfully recovered. Everything requested by the client. Every MyCloud does have a silver lining…
Drive Rescue Data Recovery is based in Dublin, Ireland. We recover data from all of the WD MyCloud range including MyCloud Gen 2, MyCloud Pro, MyCloud EX2, MyCloud EX2 Ultra, MyCloud EX4 and MyCloud Home Duo. Call us on 1890 571 571 or find out more at: www.datarecoverydublin.ie