WD My Cloud EX4 Personal Cloud Storage NAS Review

WD is somewhat new to the NAS game, but it made a splash with its single-drive My Cloud that we took a look at last month. It’s now following-up with a 4-bay variant of that NAS, focused more on the higher-end user. Better-still: It comes diskless, or packed with WD’s own Red NAS drives. How well does the company’s latest NAS stack up?

Last month, we took a look at the first product in WD’s My Cloud lineup. In our review, this editor found the device approachable, not only for those whom aren’t overly technical, but also for those on a budget. The 2TB version that we looked at had an MSRP of only $150, and can be found online at the time of writing around that price. For those looking for a better deal, the 3TB version can be had for around $180… making the $30 jump a no-brainer.

While we were testing the My Cloud 2TB, we were given hints of WD’s next product in its My Cloud team. What started as a simple teaser photo of a raised curtain, showing a very faint four bay unit, quickly became an all-out deluge of information on what we would come to know as the My Cloud EX4.

I have worked with four bay NAS boxes before and currently run a small Synology unit that uses notebook drives on my personal network. It has been used strictly for backup purposes for going on two years now, and I have come to trust the additional peace of mind that comes with a RAID 5 setup. I know, that if I lose a drive, I can easily take the spare drive I have sitting in an anti- static bag to the left of the NAS and replace the failed hardware with it. Once it’s been integrated into the storage pool, I’m back in business. That being said, that’s really my in-depth limit on four bay NAS boxes, so when WD came to us with the idea of us putting its new EX4 through its paces, we jumped at the opportunity.

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