Western Digital Extend My Cloud Lineup With EX4 4-Bay Solution

Western Digital have been hot topic within the storage world since the release of their innovative personal cloud storage drives. In a follow-up to the single drive offerings that are aimed primarily for the consumer market, Western Digital have now upped their game with a 4-bay NAS that gives all the Cloud capabilities of the single bay unit, but with some added extras.

The EX4, for those who recognise it, is somewhat similar to the Sentinel DX4000 NAS that we looked at earlier in the year, however external appearances are where the similarities end. On the inside of the EX4, a Marvell 88F6282 2GHz single core CPU is in control with the system capable of holding up to 16TB of raw storage through RAID0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD configurations as well as Western Digital’s own Flex-RAID allowing drives of different capacities to be installed and used together seamlessly.

Designed for the ‘Prosumer’, the EX4 is one of the worlds first 4-bay cloud NAS systems and whilst it offers up cloud capabilities, it still gives total flexibility to be used as a traditional local NAS device. On top of the standard My cloud features that are on offer on the single bay systems, the EX4 also includes 10 user licences for WD’s Smartware Pro software for automated computer backups as well as the ability to have a full system backup made to another remotely setup EX4, giving the total piece of mind that your data is secure. For SOHO and SMB users, Active Directory support is also included and an SDK for app developers is available from Western Digital’s website.

The EX4 is available now through a number of e-tailors and also the reseller channel with four options to choose from. The entry-level system will come with no drives giving the best user flexibility for £319, whilst 8TB, 12TB and 16TB models all kitted out with WD’s own Red drives are available for £670, £799 and £999 respectively.

Whilst this is the only multi-bay cloud solution that Western Digital are offering for now, they have noted that a 2-bay version – namely the EX2 will be available in the early part of next year.

Source: Press Event