I been tossing up whether to build a server or buy NAS for over a year now
and WD has made a NAS for the consumer market which caught my attention.
The produce spec's for the My Cloud EX4 range make it out to be a cheap cut
down version of a business class NAS, this is not the case! It may be half the
price of a server grade NAS but it is not overly complicated like server
produces and it is built on server grade components which took me by
surpise!
Some of the features it advertises are web/FTP server, media server, cloud
server, real time backup and RAID 0/1/5/JBOD.
Features that are not advertised are dual Ethernet that can be configured in
8 different modes for redundancy/load balancing/speed. You can not only change
the RAID setup but actually make separate partitions and virtual hard drives
that can be networked and act as physical drives. It even has a build in iTunes
server on the NAS that you can upload music to and everyone on the network can
access making it a central jukebox.
I've only had it up and running for a few days now but it has taken me by
surprise, and it's future proofed. If you don't like the WD Red series HDD that
come standard in the populated NAS buy the naked chassis option @ $650 and put
your own drives in.
Don't waste your time putting 2, 3 or 4 HDD in your current PC that sits in
your office or study room. BUY THIS and your storage problems and managing it
will be solved!!!
The one con I have, and the My Cloud EX4 is not at fault, is connectivity at
100Mbit is very slow with 3 people accessing it with a transfer rate of
10.8MB/s. Tried it on a 1Gbit connection and got as high as 72MB/s, that nearly
the speed of an internal HDD. Fast networks with 1Gbit Ethernet and WiFi
802 n/ac is recommended for multiple users or high data content.
