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Overall Rating
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Performance
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Features
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Price
Pros : Solid build quality, feature-rich apps, economical, DLNA server
Cons : Slow read and write speed
Bottomline : The four bay EX4 offers huge capacity and keeps your data secure. With easy to setup options and availability of various apps on different platforms, it's an affordable cloud storage solution.
WD's next cloud storage drive EX4 comes with a digital display that shows information about the product such as IP of the drive so that users can access it easily. WD NAS storage device is easy to setup. The device has LAN and USB both connection ports, so you can connect it to the network as well as directly connect with the PC using the USB port.
Setting up the drive
It is packed in a metal four-bay enclosure and supports RAID 0, RAID 1 (two disks mirrored), RAID 5+Hot Spare (same as RAID 5, but with a spare drive installed and ready to become operational in the event of a drive failure), and RAID 10 (nested RAID).
The EX4 comes with four bays with a locking mechanism. You simply need to slip the drives into the bay and lock it inside. The review unit came with four 2TB drives in RAID 5, meaning your data is completely safe. In case any one of the drives fails, you would be able to recover all the data, as it reserves 2TB of space for parity and rest 4 TB can be used by users. You can setup the EX4 over the network and create admin and other users' credentials. It can be password protected so that you can secure your data from others.
Apps and features
WD also offers mobile apps for Android and iOS devices; also there are desktop apps available for both Windows and iOS. The app and software can be configured easily with the same user credentials. You can access the drive using the app or software if connected to the Internet. You can view, copy and save files while using mobile and desktop apps. WD added advanced features to the drive such as support for DLNA/UPnP devices for streaming Internet connection for remote access.
It features iSCSI target, full-featured FTP services, link aggregation and failover support, jumbo frame support, iPv6 ready, UPS support (USB and network), real-time resource monitor, volume encryption with boot-up password, SNMP, and virtual volumes.
Performance: WD My Cloud EX4 is equipped with a dual-core processor and Gigabit Ethernet that offers stunning transfer speed and remote access. To check the real world performance of the NAS drive, we transferred the assorted data of 3 GB. The drive delivered 26.4 MB/s read and 16.8 MB/s write speed using the testbed (Intel Core i5 CPU, 4X2 Kingston DDR3 RAM, Windows 7 OS and Cooler Master 350 Plus) on our local network. Though it’s not an impressive speed, but for users who are looking to expand their data storage, this is an economical choice.
We were able to add users via the PC app and users were able to access the device without any delay. Transferring the data from one device to another was quite easy. We were able to stream videos and edit documents effortlessly within a group of four. Even using the smartphone to access the device was a seamless experience.