Western Digital’s My Cloud EX2 is part of their network attached storage (NAS) product range for the home, meant specifically to store and stream multimedia content.
The My Cloud EX2 carries the design cues see on other WD products, a mixture of curved front and plain looking surface for that simple and sleek look.
The unit has a ventilation grille on the top, it has 4 padded feet at the base and at the back are 2x USB 3.0 ports, 1x Gigabit Ethernet port and the power socket.
The drives are accessible via opening of the lid that’s on the top.
The drives are easily removed, in case you want to upgrade them.
The WD My Cloud EX2 series comes with WD RED Storage drives that were made for NAS.
The My Cloud EX2 works not just with Windows and Mac OS systems but it works on mobile devices too, those running Android and iOS.
More details at the official product page.
User Experience
Installation was a breeze, just follow the steps to download the software and follow the steps that are provided by the software and you’ll gain access to the EX2 on your network in a jiffy.
Once you’re in the administration interface, you’ll see the details of the drive. If you’re new to this, you’ll probably be surprised or even felt short-changed when you see 2TB instead of 4TB – hold your horses!
The unit comes in RAID setup by default, as with RAID 0 and RAID 1, you’ll only see 2TB. RAID 1 is the default RAID configuration, meaning the drives are mirrored. Mirrored drives are for “security” purpose, this means your data is stored in both drives and one is still available in case the other kicks the bucket.
While RAID 0 option is available, I wouldn’t recommend it as RAID 0 means the drives work together and losing 1 of them means a loss in all data. The risk is too huge just to gain faster data access.
The interface also shows the health of the drive.
If RAID setup isn’t necessary, you may configure the storage to span across the drives instead so the storage space will be the total amount available.
The Verdict
The WD My Cloud EX2 4TB retails at RM 1,159. If you need more storage, there’s the 6TB variant for RM1,459 and 8TB variant for RM1,959.
Quality cloud storage comes at a cost. One thing’s for sure, you need not worry about subscription. đŸ™‚
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