Western Digital EX4 8TB 4-bay My Cloud NAS Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The EX4 is available in one of four versions, three of which come with a set of pre-installed WD Red hard drives ready for near plug-and-play operation, whilst a fourth model comes disk-free, ready for the end-user to install drives of their own choosing. The unit we have looked at today comes with the lowest of the pre-installed capacities at 8TB and in the US, Newegg.com have this unit available for $749.99. UK pricing sees the 8TB model available for just under £620 at Scan.co.uk whilst Germany sees prices start at just over €660 on Amazon.de.

Overview

Western Digital made a huge breakthrough in personal storage late last year when we saw the release of the My Cloud 2TB and as cloud storage is getting more popular with home and business users alike, it’s great to see that WD have seen the future and jumped in on the market before anybody else. The EX4 is simply an extension to the success that the single drive My Cloud has seen and naturally it comes with a heap of additional benefits on top of the ability to remotely access the system from anywhere in the world.

One of the key benefits of choosing the EX4 is more secure data. Now when I say more secure, I mean the data within the unit itself. By having multiple drive bays, WD have been able to incorporate RAID management into the system and this includes my favourite for NAS – RAID5. When you think about it, it is great to have all your files on hand from wherever you are, but if all that data is stored on a single drive which is unfortunate enough to fail, then all of that precious data is potentially lost forever. RAID5 allows for a single drive to fail whilst leaving the integrity of the data in place and at the same time it offers the best and biggest balance between storage capacity and redundancy.

Other features that the EX4 offers include the ability to have a secondary unit positioned in another location on a separate internet connection, but with a direct connection to the ‘master’ unit. Through this link, the secondary system can keep a real-time progressive copy of the data on hand, so should a situation arise where the first unit is taken out of action (flood or fire for example), the secondary unit is there to ensure the data is once again kept secure.

Looking at the performance of the EX4 on a local network, performance is pretty good, but it is not as fast as a typical four bay NAS that is built for local operations. To be honest though, this is only going to affect anyone who is connecting to the system from the local network, but if you’re specifically looking for a system for remote access, then this minor factor is nothing to really worry about. All I will point out is that the remote performance that you will experience is directly related to the internet connection speed that you have at the location where the system is placed – the home for example. If you are looking to stream content from the system to a mobile device for example, the having an upload speed over 10-15Mbps is going to be of a great advantage as I found slower uploads (~1Mbps) resulting in long buffer times or on a couple of instances not playing at all – this though is no fault of Western Digital and is purely my advice.

Overall I am more than happy with the EX4. Considering Western Digital offer three pre-packed systems with either 8, 12 or 16TB worth of Red drives plus the option to buy the system disk free, there is plenty of flexibility on hand and with a very easy user interface to work with, this system is ideal for both home users and business users alike.

Pros:

• Easy to use interface and desktop/mobile application
• Available with pre-installed drives
• Security of data through RAID configuration
• Plug-and-play design

Cons:

• Data throughput on local network not as fast as a dedicated local NAS.

“The My Cloud line of systems from Western Digital are proving to be very popular with both home and business, where the need to access data on the go is vital. The cost and piece of mind factor that these systems provide is far greater than that of a cloud storage provider, where space is at a premium. The EX4 takes personal cloud storage up a notch with redundancy for not just the data but also the power and network connection, ensuring virtually every situation is covered.”

Thanks to Western Digital for providing us with this review sample.