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

MyCloud GUI & Power Consumption

When I took a look at the 2TB single drive My Cloud, I found the user interface to be very simple to work with and this is a good thing. Everything that you needed to configure and maintain the system was easy to find and in most cases, only a couple of clicks away. With the EX4 being part of the My Cloud family, it is not surprise that the same type of user interface is on hand to use, although over the single drive unit, there are one or two added extras on hand for configuration of the drives and all the typical RAID arrays that we would expect to see on a four bay system.

Power Consumption

When we look at the power usage, thanks to the use of WD’s own low power Red drives for consumer NAS, the idle and load power draw figures are comfortably below the 30W level. The system automatically spins down the drives after a given amount of time (which can be adjusted) and at this point the system uses a little over 10W and consequently the system has a pretty low operating cost over an extended period.