WD My Cloud EX4 Personal Cloud Storage NAS Review

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] 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. Immediately, there are a few things that set the EX4 apart from the NAS pack WD has decided to run with. The front face of the EX4 has a small LCD screen that can display system and diagnostic information, as well as alerts that the user might need to take note of. Next to that screen are a pair of buttons that allow the user to interface with that screen. By cycling up and down through the available options, the LCD screen can display basic information about the EX4 such as hostname, IP address, drive health, temperature, fan speed and in the case of this editor, rebuild time. Curious how the EX4 would react, I pulled the right most drive out in the middle of a large data set copy - but more on this a little later. The front of the EX4 has four easily accessible drive bays, each with a release handle at their top. I call these "bays" because unlike many other offerings, WD has decided to forgo drive sleds and simply make the front bay doors just that, doors. Actuated on springs, the doors open outward and downward, granting easy access to the drive bay. Once the drive is about three-quarters of the way in, it hits a spring-loaded lever that will provide resistance when closing the door. This lever helps eject the drives when the door is opened, as well as gently guide them into place when the door is being closed. The back of the EX4 holds its own share of surprises. Turning the NAS around, we find a 90mm fan that spins at 3400 RPMs, a pair of USB 3.0 ports, dual gigabit NICs and a set of power ports. With many NAS devices designed for SOHO environments, we see dual USB and network ports, but this is the first time I have seen redundant power on a device of this nature. There are offerings with this capability, but they are almost entirely found in rack-mountable form. While the EX4 ships with only one power supply, a second one can be purchased from almost all current WD partners for a currently unknown price. This is a nice feature, but one has to ask themselves, “Do I have two independent circuits in my office or home?" If the answer is no, you are really only protecting yourself from power adapter failure, but as far as nice features to have, this is a definite feather in WD's cap. On a hardware and software front, the EX4 has some nice specs. Fresh from the WD-provided spec sheet, with the EX4 you get the following: 2.0 GHz Processor (Feroceon 88FR131 rev 1) 512 MHz of system memory. USB 3.0 x 2. A metal enclosure with “Easy Slide Drives” that allow drive changes in around 5 seconds. Dual power and network ports. Optimized for WD Red drives with WD's exclusive NASware technology. Twonky 7.2 DLNA 1.5 media server and iTunes server support. Robust web interface to manage the EX4. RAID 0, 1, 5, 10; JBOD. Multiple desktop and mobile applications. On the next page, we'll take a deep-dive into a look at the device setup and its interface. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Setup and Interface][Top Ad] For those of you that read our My Cloud 2TB review, the setup and interface of the EX4 might look familiar. There are many pictures and descriptions in that review that will not be found in this one in an attempt to keep redundant information to a minimum. However, if we feel it belongs, we have included it. By clicking the link above, you can easily get to our previous review for comparison. When plugged in and powered up, one of the first things that happens is the EX4 makes a call to the DHCP server for an IP address. This IP address, once granted, can be found in either your router's logs or on the LCD screen on the front of the device. By browsing to the LAN IP address of the EX4 on the PC, you are greeted with some setup screens. The first screen simply asks that the user agree to the EULA. You can choose your language preference on this screen as well. For those of you that don't simply click through everything, the actual agreement can be found by clicking on the link to the right of the check box. By clicking next on the EULA screen, we are asked to create a WDMyCloud.com account. This registers your My Cloud device with the WDMyCloud online service and allows access to your password-protected data from anywhere with an open Internet connection. The next screen we come to asks for some simple preferences to be set. By default, the automatic firmware update box is checked. This is something that I always choose to disable - it's my personal preference and has been formed out of a fear of an unobserved firmware update knocking my data offline while it does its thing. In a home environment, this is less of an issue, but if this device, or any other like it, were to be used in an office setting, taking the NAS offline for a necessary reboot can have serious repercussions within said setting. Long story short, think on your choice here. There are also links that take you to WD's web site, allowing the download of iOS and Android apps, taking you to a FAQ page as well as providing download links for the WD supplied backup software. You can also register your EX4, allowing the receipt of “continuous product support.” Once the initial setup has been done, we come to the home screen. This, by default, will be the page that loads anytime the end-user logs into their EX4's Web interface. On this home screen we have overall capacity, system health, resource utilization, and quick links to set up cloud access, new users and new apps. In the upper right hand of the screen there are icons for USB attached devices, alerts/system events, and help. Skipping over some of the areas touched upon in our previous My Cloud review, we stop on the backups page. In this we can set up a multitude of backups options. The first choice is backups via USB. Not only can we backup the EX4 to a USB attached device, but also backup that same USB device to the EX4. This allows a quick and convenient method of backing up an external hard drive or thumb drive. The second option is to run a remote backup. This will backup the EX4 to another server in or outside of your network. Once a few conditions are met, this can be enabled and setup through the UI. The third option is to run an internal backup. This simply takes one storage location and backs it up to another on the same EX4 device. This is something that can be scheduled, as well as run with only incremental backups after the original. This personally doesn't make a lot of sense to me but I am sure there are plenty of use cases out there that might benefit from something like this. It personally reminds me of something along the lines of snapshotting. The final option is to backup to the “Cloud”. The two available options here are to Elephant Drive or Amazon S3. There are obvious benefits to a solution like this but even with smaller drives, this solution can quickly become cost prohibitive. On the storage tab, we find our RAID configuration, disk status, iSCSI and volume virtualization. Staring with the RAID options, we have the ability to set up the type of RAID we want to use in the EX4. Offering 0, 1, 5, 5 plus a hot spare and 10, there are plenty of options available to the user at setup. The ability to have RAID online migration and disk array roaming is an added bonus as well. There is also the ability to mix and match drives by setting up your disks in something WD calls “Flex-RAID”. This allows the user to use dissimilar drives (so long as they are all SATA) and still have some form of data redundancy. The disk status section will provide information on the individual drive's health, list out its firmware version and serial number, capacity, as well as read out its S.M.A.R.T. data. While an alert will get sent you of an issue with a drive or an array, this is another location to get the overall health of your drives. The option of setting up an iSCSI target, or targets, is nice. This allows easy drive mapping to a workstation as well as better performance, as we will see in a bit. When a LUN is created, it still resides on the same volume that was originally setup, meaning that its data is still protected by the “Underlying RAID structure of the WD My Cloud EX4 Server.” Thanks WD, for that quote. The last section is volume virtualization. This is an odd one but interesting nonetheless. What it allows is the mapping of other iSCSI LUNs, on other devices, to the EX4. This allows the EX4 to use those mapped LUNs as its own storage, allowing for easier backups or simply to have more storage presented to the device...

WD My Cloud EX4 Personal Cloud Storage NAS Review

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