Western Digital My Cloud 2TB Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

Western Digital’s My Cloud is available in three capacities and with pricing one of the main focus points for this unit, the pricing structure is also highly competitive. The cheapest of the three models comes with a 2TB drive for around the £129 mark, with a 4TB model now available for around £189 and conveniently the 3TB model sits directly in between the top and bottom models at around £159.

Overview

When you break things down and look at the fundamental basics of what this drive offers – namely remote access – it has to be said that the cloud approach to doing so has made our connected lives so much easier. Many NAS vendors offer up their own ways of getting remote access to a network connected storage device, but for the average Joe, this is simply too complex to get going. By the time you take dynamic IP addressing into account from your ISP and then the need to check and recheck that everything works as it should, but not forgetting that it may only work on laptops for example; the general feel is that it’s too much hassle to get going. This is the My Cloud come up leaps and bounds over everything else. On connecting your My Cloud to the internet, it automatically sets everything up and once you’ve connected your mobile device or laptop for the first time and enabled remote access on the My Cloud, you’re pretty much ready to dump some content on the drive and connect back in from where ever your are.

Now whilst I say that connecting in is an easy affair – and to be honest it is, there is one fundamentally important factor that must be taken into account for a smooth remote experience. This is your internet connection. Before I go on, this is not a fault of Western Digital by any means as it affects all remote services that you would use to connect back home. During my testing of this unit, I had the My Cloud first connected to our office internet connection which has a mare 1Mbps upload speed. Whilst connecting to the drive took a bit of time, being able to access documents and photos wasn’t too bad, but music and more especially videos to a lot longer to buffer and in some cases would be un-watchable do to the video buffer running out too soon. In a complete turn around of events, moving the My Cloud to a location with a considerably faster connection speed (my home with a 20Mbps upload for reference) saw a significant improvement when connecting in and even high-definition films streamed without a glitch. Whittling that all down into a nutshell. If you plan on streaming films and music to another device when you’re not home, then having a fast broadband upload speed is the key to success.

Looking over the rest of the My Cloud, the local performance is OK for a single bay storage device, but it’s not the fastest speed that I’ve seen at the same time. As a result, transferring media content such as music and videos will take longer to move over, but if you’re like me in that you drag the content over to start copying and then walk away, then this is less of a worry to be honest.

So where does this leave the My Cloud? Well it’s hands down a great system. Even when compared Western Digital’s own device, the My Book Live, the My Cloud simplifies the process of remotely accessing your data as well as sharing your files out to another person with a special [secure] URL that points them to that one item and that one item only, keeping security at the top of the pecking order. As I’ve highlighted above, I will strongly recommend that a fast internet connection is required (5Mbps or more upload speed), but for simple file access when out and about, you can’t go too far wrong – especially as you get a heap more storage for your money when compared to other cloud storage providers.

Pros

• Easy to setup cloud based platform
• Secure 256-bit AES encryption on all connections
• Easy to use mobile and desktop applications
• Easy to manage UI

Cons

• Fast internet upload speed required for smooth audio and video playback remotely
• No data redundancy out of the box

“Many people are worried about the security of their data when it’s stored in the cloud by a third-party company, however the My Cloud brings security as well as piece of mind for a much lower cost. With our connected lives becoming more and more dependant on remotely storing data, the My Cloud is a great personal device that gives you a simple and easy to use solution with no compromise on security.”

Thank you to Western Digital for providing this review sample.