I've tried for days to find an answer to this problem. It seems (to me, at least) rather subtle, so I'll try to be very precise in my description of it. Needless to say, I would really like to find a solution... Anyway, here's the problem:
I have an x86 NAS unit (fw 4.2.27) that I wanted to use to consolidate all of my music files. I had maintained many of these files on a Western Digital "passport", which is a 2 TB USB drive, and I wanted to save them on a more reliable media (the NAS). Step 1: I connected the "passport" USB drive to the front panel USB port on the NAS. Step 2: From Frontview, I then designated the "passport" USB drive as a USB share, and the NAS unit labeled it as "USB_HDD_1". It now seems that designating the "passport" USB drive as a share was a mistake.
I call this a mistake because what I actually wanted to do was copy all of the files from the USB "passport" drive to one of the "real shares" on the NAS unit. After designating the "passport" as a share, and attempting to copy its files to a "real share" on the NAS, I found the copy operation was going to consume an inordinate amount of time (I assume this was because the files weren't going directly over the USB interface, but rather getting my Windows machine involved in the transfer via WiFi?)
I then discovered an option in Frontview (the "USB Flash Device Option") that would allow me to copy files to a "real share" anytime a USB device was connected to the front panel USB port of the NAS. I set that up, and tested it with a small thumb drive USB - it worked exactly as expected. The trouble started when I re-connected my "passport" USB drive: The NAS unit refuses to forget that this device was once designated as a share, and each time it's re-connected, it identifies it as a share.
I found I could not delete a USB share as I could a "regular" share. I tried installing an app that deleted a USB share. It seemed to do whatever it was supposed to do, but when I re-connected the "passport" USB drive, it re-appeared as a share instead of copying its contents to the share I had designated.
What I want to do is copy files from the "passport" USB to a share on the NAS *without* having to do a day-long file transfer via WiFi. I thought that the "USB Flash Device Option" would do that (copy files via the USB interface), but the problem seems to be that the NAS unit will treat the "passport" USB drive *only* as a share, and it won't forget that - despite my use of the delete USB share app.
Do you have any data on the NAS that you care about? If not, a factory reset (setting up the NAS again) will certainly destroy the share. Rather extreme, but it will work.
Yeah, unfortunately I do - the other half of my music library.
And I failed to mention this in my OP, but the other suggestion that I tried was to login to the NAS via SSH, and remove the contents of a file (don't remember the name of that file now). So I tried that, but it had no more effect than the 'delete USB share' app had.
Wow! So the impression I'm getting is that this is impossible to do without a reset. Is it just me, or does anyone else think that is incredibly lame and stupid?
