I have the unfortunate luck to have purchased one of the MyCloud OS3 devices that is now being unsupported for personalized Cloud storage.
What I really liked about it at the time was that it was networkable 3TB drive with USB3 and I could use it as a “safer” alternative to transfer and store pictures from my phone without it going into a corporate cloud.
I’m coming here to ask if anyone has any recommendations to setup an alternative OS so that I might be able to use the device the way I want.
In the meantime, since WD didn’t have a better alternative for what I wanted I setup a 10TB drive on an older PC with TrueNAS. Hopefully I can figure out how to enable cloud support for it.
WD Letter Below:
Western Digital continuously evaluates and improves our hardware, software, and services as security standards evolve. As a result, we’ve determined that it’s necessary to end support for prior generations of My Cloud OS, including My Cloud OS 3. You should act now to protect your content.
On April 15, 2022 , support for prior generations of My Cloud OS, including My Cloud OS 3, will end. Your device isn’t compatible that are only available for My Cloud OS 5-compatible devices. As a result, you’ll only be able to access it locally. After April 15, 2022 , your device will no longer receive remote access, security updates, or technical support. To help protect your content, we recommend that you immediately back up your device, disable remote access, disconnect it from the internet, and then protect it with a strong, unique password. Check out our recent My Cloud updates to learn more.
Thank you for being a long-time Western Digital customer. We understand that your content is important to you, and we appreciate that you trust us to help you preserve it. To show our appreciation, we’re sending you a 20% discount coupon in January 2022 that you can use toward an eligible device. Keep your eye out for another email from us with information about that discount.
Getting a new OS on that device is going to be a nightmare, at best. WD will have closed the loopholes for doing so so your only option is via the WD update facility. Which requires a WD key for validation. Which WD won’t give you
WD states your data remains locally accessible, I’m assuming via the USB3 port. Add a Raspberry Pi to act as the remote accessible local device for the drive instead. Does require some tweaking and programming to get the RPi to work as a passthrough device the way you want it, have a look online, there’s probably already a few folks doing the work for you
They mean you can still access it via ethernet and local shared drive letters.
I have no idea how you would or even could replace the os baked onto the firmware. Best option is to probably open it up and yank out the HDD in it and stick it in a PC, though I’ve always wondered if that would work as well.
In short, you first look around both in software and in hardware, you look for similar hardware that if already supported, and you try to boot an initramfs image of the network maybe, that you built yourself… if you’re lucky it may be possible and it may partially work.
if you’re unlucky it won’t be possible, and might require in device programming of the nor chip with e.g. a soic-8 clip and a raspberry pi on the side, and might require soldering wires to get serial port console access to debug the kernel and the bootloader. Alternatively, maybe there’s an easy way to get root on the device and you can maybe put debugging tools on, and that’ll help you piece together the device tree.
As @Dutch_Master said, it’s a nightmare… yet some people go through it.
My advice, if you’re not feeling adventurous, shuck the drive, and either use it directly attached to your PC internally, or through a USB3 sata adapter, or connect it to something else networked like a NAS of some kind, or build your own NAS.
The annoying thing will be the power supply. It’s a big 3.5" in there, it probably needs a lot of power. Some WD drives have shucking protection requiring you too remove 12V power from the power rail if you’re powering it from a PC ATX power supply, but that’s easy.
Personally, I’d avoid Raspberry pi for NAS use cases - I like my data encrypted and raspberry pi doesn’t support hardware AES acceleration. Many other 64bit arm SBCs are better for that, e.g. Rock Pi Pro 64, or Odroid n2+ or khadas vim3.
