WD My Cloud drive owners 'strongly' advised to upgrade to the company's latest firmware

[Humza]

The big picture: Western Digital announced last week that it's dropping support for older versions of My Cloud OS, the software used for managing My Cloud drives. As a result, drive owners still running older firmware versions - My Cloud OS 3 and prior - have been strongly advised to upgrade their compatible models to My Cloud OS 5 by mid-January in order to receive security fixes, tech support and retain remote access capability. Meanwhile, drives unable to upgrade will stop receiving security fixes and support for their older firmware by mid-April.

Having a ‘connected’ drive you’re likely keeping for backup isn’t ideal in terms of data security; however, the feature is certainly convenient for users who want access to their content across more devices and places. To that end, WD recently put out a security update, in which it ‘strongly’ encouraged owners of My Cloud drives to upgrade to the latest firmware so that they can continue to remotely access their drives and receive security fixes in the future.

The development follows WD’s decision to end support for older My Cloud OS versions to keep up with evolving security standards. The company also shared a list of drives compatible with My Cloud OS 5, and a guide to upgrading to the latest firmware.

NAS models like the My Cloud EX2 Ultra and PR2100 are upgradeable, while ‘not supported’ models include the likes of My Book Live/Live Duo series that came under attack earlier this year, forcing users to unplug their drives from the internet for safety.

In fact, WD has similar advice to owners of incompatible models, noting that drives running on My Cloud OS 3 and older should be backed up, disconnected from the internet. and protected with a strong password as their firmware will stop receiving security fixes and tech support after April 15, 2022.

There is a slight consolation for incompatible My Cloud owners, as noted by Bleeping Computer. WD looks to entice such users with a 20 percent discount coupon, which will be emailed to them next month and will apply to select WD models that include the My Cloud Home 8TB, My Book 12TB and the EX2 Ultra (16TB, 24TB, 28TB).

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https://www.techspot.com/news/92693-wd-cloud-drive-owners-trongly-advised-upgrade-company.html

 

[DZillaXx]

Plenty of perfectly good NAS drives out there getting left to rot. Sadly most of those old drives were slow when new. We have 3x 3TB models running the old OS3. They are only used as backup drives on a private network that doesn't face the internet.

The CPU's in these old models that even doing stuff like rsync from the terminal is dead slow. These run linux and are fully capable of having apps installed via the terminal as well. But the WD firmware they run is bloated from day one. So using these old drives for anything more than basic backup storage for another faster Storage setup is worthless.

 

[snoobler]

Yeah, sounds great. Unfortunately, this upgrade can render your RAID inaccessible. This personally happened to me. I went through the upgrade process on an 8T EX2 Ultra (4T RAID 1) that's been running reliably for about 5 years. Upon installing OS5, the RAID was completely removed. Both drives were present and healthy, but the RAID was gone. Attempts to re-create the array indicated that all data would be destroyed.

Unfortunately, WD tech support was completely worthless. Every troubleshooting step they provided was clearly impossible based on the screenshot information I provided in my support request.

I was able to downgrade the unit back to OS3 following these steps:

Volume failure after upgrading My Cloud Mirror 2 to OS5

Hi guys, I found the way to revert the my My Cloud Mirror 2 back to OS3 2.41.116. Here is what I did: Take out the HDDs and replace them with 2 others blank (just for the safety of the data inside. You need to have HDDs inside to be able to use the My Cloud Mirror 2) / Formatting them to to...

community.wd.com

It involves BUYING NEW DRIVES to fix the issue.

Upon replacing the new drives with the drives from the original RAID, the RAID was restored, and all data was accessible.

Having been a WD customer for close to 30 years, I am deeply disappointed.