Western Digital My Cloud EX4100 - Reviews

(4.2)

5 reviews

Info

Reviewbucket.co.uk scanned the internet for Western Digital My Cloud EX4100 reviews.
You can find all Western Digital My Cloud EX4100 reviews and ratings on this page.

Read the reviews.

Analysis

For Western Digital My Cloud EX4100, 5 customer reviews collected from 1 e-commerce sites, and the average score is 4.2.

Detailed seller stats;
Amazon has 5 customer reviews and the average score is 4.2. Go to this seller.

Detail

Click to list all products in this category.

Similar Items

2.4.2015

If you are already tech savvy you will know what a NAS is, if you dont i will explain.A NAS - Network Access Storage is a tower of hard drive discs that vary in size, you can get 2, 4, 6, 8 drives of the same volume but if it is Raid enabled which means Redundant Array of Independent disks, only a portion of that volume is available for you to store things on. Why i hear you say, well its a failsafe, if the portion fails you have a perfect copy of it.So say you have a 4tb system, this will be on 2 x 2tb of storage, you will write to the 1 hdd of storage and you can set it up to enable the other to copy whatever you put on it so you have a permanent backup.On the very slight chance of the hard drives failing for example you can swap them out,so say the 1st one fails, the 2nd one is a back up, so you can replace the 1st one and it will copy whats on the 2nd one.Confusing and clever i know but thats the simplest way i can explain it.It is essentially your very own cloud server, but no monthly fees to pay, you can access it anytime from anywhere in the world, providing of course it is switched on if you leave home, it supports encryption so very easy to set up a hard to crack 20 plus digit password, 20 digits you say how will i remember that, well i put a 28 one on mine and i can remember that easily and best of all it would take a computer hacker or the government abut a billion years to try and hack it so completely safe.Once out of the box you connect to your existing ADSL router and plug into a spare port, the cable is included in the box, you then download the WD Cloud app to your computer, tablet, phone, laptop etc and from there it becomes a drag and drop system.You just pick a file and drag and drop into the cloud, you can set it to constantly back up your computer, tablet or laptop and even your phone, this is a very handy feature as sd cards fail all the time.Anyway the 1st thing you will need to do is update the firmware, this is a very simple process, you download the firmware directly from the WD website, and save it to your desktop, unfortunately it is in a zip file so if you dont already have it like i didnt you will need to download winzip. Anyway unzip it to your desktop and you have an accessible file. Go to the My cloud app and go to settings/firmware update, select the file from your desktop and thats it.I have had this 10 days now and im still figuring out stuff that it can do, obviously im not very tech savvy so dont undersand it all right away but there are so many cool features.Streaming music has been the best thing for me so far, you can stream and play to any and all of your devices, or xbox, playstation 3, bluray players etc, however it also support itunes so if all your music is in itunes you will not need to convert it all to wma or mp3 for it to be able to play.I am a photographer so this is primarily a storage for my pictures of which i have thousands and thousands stored on external hdd drives, i have still not transferred them all to this as it is going to take about a month or so to get it all uploaded, so if you think this is an easy set up you are quite mistaken, it has a really good transfer speed rate but it will slow your computer down so try and do it when you dont want to surf the net etc.Going back to the RAID capabilities for a minute, this device supports Raid 0, 1, 5 and 10. It also supports spanning and Jbod.Be very careful when choosing which mode you wish to run as changing it when you already have files on there will delete everything you have and you will have to start again, for reference mine is on raid 5.RAID 5 is by far the most common RAID configuration for servers and enterprise NAS devices. This RAID level provides better performance than mirroring as well as fault tolerance. With this configuration, data and parity (which is additional data used for recovery) are striped across three or more disks. If a disk gets an error or starts to fail, data is recreated from this distributed data and parity block— seamlessly and automatically. Essentially, the system is still operational even when one disk bites the bullet and until you can replace the failed drive.Anyway thats my experience so far, this comes with a 2 year guarantee which is not so good considering the cost, i would of thought a 5/10 year guarantee would be more suitable but never mind.Also the cost of the replacement discs should they fail is quite costly, this one for example has 4TB discs and they cost £137 each to replace at time of writing.Overall if you are a photographer like me this will be an amazing addition to your equipment, or if you are a videographer or an audiophile this would be perfect for you, and also this would be able to cope with the demands of a small business very easily.Complicated but worth it.

1.5.2015

I take a lot of photographs. Actually, in this house we take a lot of photographs and it doesn't take long for a computer hard drive to start filling up, especially when you have lots of videos of your holidays, grandchildren, weddings, pets, etc. "Oh, you can save it all to Cloud in case something happens to your PC" they said. Yes, indeed, but something made me wary of investigating that; it's not really there. It only exists in the ether, if you know what I mean. Then this came along.Now, I'm far from being a technophile but this was no more difficult to set up than programming a video recorder, though I had to download a firmware update from 1.06.124 to 1.06.127, which took a while.You do get a lead for ADSL connection, as well as a three pin and two pin plug. There are also two AC/DC sockets round the back in case one fails. The interface is easy to use with plenty of information to hand. However, though the total capacity is 16TB, mine is showing only 11.89TB as available. (I say 'only', as it's still a lot.)The fan is a bit noisy when you switch it on but calms down after a minute or so. As this utilises four drives, there are four RAID options; 0, 1, 5 and 10 (the last two are only available for four bay machines). The beauty of this is that with those four bays you can split it into sections, so different people can access their own parts, or their 'share'. As I use mine for storing photos, etc, the best option for me was to have mine on the default RAID 5, as that's best suited for small 'transactions'. If you do decide to alter your mode, you'll lose everything, so choose wisely. Providing your personal cloud is on, you can stream any of the content to a variety of devices, and it's all free of charge (other than the initial outlay that is); Blu-ray, PS3, digital photo frames, Xbox360, and an appropriate television. I haven't tried streaming anything from iTunes, as I don't download music, so I can't comment on that particular feature, though I assume it works in the same way.At the front of this unit is a USB 3.0 port that has direct copy, which allows you to back up a USB stick simply by pressing a button above it. Apparently, this NAS unit can support RAW and 4K video, but I haven't got round to finding that out yet. If the 16TB system isn't enough, you can always swap the drives for 6TB ones to give you 24TB overall.It actually looks good too and the blue digital display gives a readout of fan speed and internal temperature. That 11.89TB of space, which I think is disappointing considering its 4x4TB? That's equivalent to storing this review nearly 611,000,000 times. A word of caution though, the alleged quick install guide this comes with isn't. Quick that is.The standard warranty period is two years but when I tried to register this unit I was told that my warranty had finished the day I ordered it. On questioning why, I received this response from Service and Support: "According to our system records this specific product is a quality sample and the warranty cannot be applied on it. I'm really sorry, but we cannot update your warranty status for this device." So, it seems that if it stops working, it's just tough.You have to ask yourself what's best for your valuable photos, videos, documents, etc. An unknown public server, or your own one where you know exactly what's going on? Other than Western Digital not willing to honour any warranty should I have a problem (but yours will be guaranteed), this is good stuff.