Western Digital My Cloud Review: The $150 personal cloud

In the consumer electronics world, simplicity is king. Manufacturers must constantly struggle to balance power and complexity with ease of use. Western Digital has been walking that tightrope for a while now with its My Book line of personal storage products, trying to pack in features without making the devices too difficult to use. Last year we saw the company try its hand at a networked solution with the My Book Live, and now it's taking this idea a bit further with the WD My Cloud. My Cloud is a set of personal "cloud-in-a-box" products designed to not just store your stuff, but to let you take it outside of your home. Could this be the network storage system for the layman?

The Appliance NAS

The WD My Cloud certainly falls in a safe and friendly space in the looks department. WD isn't straying too far from the My Book line, and this 2TB version looks like a standard external disk enclosure with a 3.5” disk inside. However, flip it around back and you see the additional port that makes all the difference: a single Gigabit Ethernet port.

The My Cloud line comes with Western Digital's Red drives, which are designed to be used in consumer network-attached storage (NAS) systems. WD Reds have NAS-friendly features like faster error recovery, more vibration tolerance, and power optimizations. Judged by MSRP alone, buying the 2TB My Cloud gets you a $180 NAS and a free 2TB disk. Looking at street price, you see an affordable single drive NAS, for which the cost of the disk alone would make up one-third of the total price.

A MACOM-sourced, dual-core, ARM Cortex-A9 system-on-a-chip drives the My Cloud, and, despite the modest lineage relative to modern mobile ARM chipsets, it is more than enough to drive the My Cloud. However speed isn’t enough in this space; it also has to be easy to use.

Packed in with the My Cloud is a little slip of paper with a phone number on it; that number leads to what Western Digital calls its WD Concierge service. Users can call this hotline when setting up and using their My Cloud, and this small gesture does a lot to make buyers feel like they’ve purchased something with help when needed. There are no discs or bulky manuals in the box, so aside from the concierge number, there's a simple quick set-up guide that tells you how to log onto the My Cloud from your browser. From there, a Web portal guides My Cloud set-up and directs users to download desktop applications for additional set-up, configuration, and backup options.

WD is clearly aware that the majority of a user’s content creation happens on their phones. So the company put a lot of time into building the My Cloud with an eye toward mobile devices. Download the WD My Cloud app on your Android or iOS phone or tablet, and you’ll be able to run through initial configuration of a My Cloud, receive firmware updates, and access files on the device. Download the WD MyPhotos app and you’ll be able to back-up all the photos and videos you take on your phone directly to your My Cloud. All of these app functions work from your home Wi-Fi network, your work network, or even a cellular connection.

Performance

The theoretical maximum throughput of a Gigabit Ethernet connection is about 128MBps, just a hair slower than what the 2TB WD Red drive is capable of achieving under ideal read and write conditions. Many higher-end consumer NAS set-ups can saturate Gigabit Ethernet, giving you more than enough bandwidth to stream multiple HD movies to devices on your network. The 2TB My Cloud isn't ever going to compete at that level, but it does get a lot closer than we’d expected.

Transferring a large file back and forth from the WD My Cloud to an SSD-equipped computer demonstrated read performance of about 96MBps. Write performance hovered around 55MBps. Those speeds don’t touch the speeds our Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson reached on his much more expensive Synology DS-412+ unit, but for a single drive solution at this price, that’s still plenty quick.

Features and apps

You can configure and even update the My Cloud entirely with WD's mobile app, which is impressive, but doing so isn't necessarily the most user-friendly way to go about it. Here, the Android client falls a little short of the ideal. The MyPhotos app is simple to set-up and provides a fairly consistent experience. The My Cloud app, though, is just a series of lists. A search function is handy and straightforward, but it would be better if it at least offered the ability to “favorite” certain folders for easy access or provided a list of frequently accessed files and folders like the desktop clients do.

The iOS My Cloud app mirrors the issues of the Android one, but it has a worse MyPhotos experience. The iOS MyPhotos app lacks the ability to automatically upload photos and videos, making it necessary to selectively upload files.

The Web portal is stylish and simple—almost too simple, in fact. The interface spotlights important information, but drilling down into a category isn’t nearly as revealing as power users might hope. This is the "Web portal as widget" more than a powerful console. There are no graphs of access and performance over time, no detailed breakdowns of user activity, and no access to activity logs. Still, the system doesn’t suffer as much as you might expect for the simplicity. Adding users, shares, and managing settings requires no trips to a knowledge base to hunt down a specific default parameter. Just click, provide a name, toggle some self-explanatory switches, and you’re on your way.

Windows and Mac users can put the My Cloud to use for backups using their native clients: Windows Backup and Time Machine. For Windows users, simply right-click on any share from Explorer, select “Map network drive,” and follow the prompts. Next open the Windows Backup Wizard, and you’ll be backing up your computer in no time.

After configuring Time Machine access from the Web portal, Mac users should see the My Cloud as a Time Machine destination from their computer. Unlike the Synology system we tested, though, the My Cloud doesn’t allow users to manipulate the size of a given share. This means that over time, Time Machine could fill up the My Cloud. Apple and WD’s lack of user-facing controls make you do a little more maintenance than necessary. Being able to establish a set number of backups in Time Machine or limiting a share size in My Cloud would solve this issue. Instead, users have to remember to periodically go into Time Machine and clear out some backups.

If you’re on Linux, official support is utterly lacking—but that doesn’t mean all is lost. Some intrepid users have been able to mount the My Cloud as an NFS share, enabling it to work as backup and to support Linux systems. The tinkerer’s heart in every Linux fan might prefer a system with more bells and whistles, but for the cost it is hard to argue against a fast NAS you can just access through a terminal.

Windows users can also use WD’s SmartWare backup software. It doesn’t do system-level backup, but it can automatically scrape selected drives for different file categories and preserve them in their original file structure. The content is then mirrored to categorical folders on your drive to easily find the files you’re looking for, which makes restoring files easy. SmartWare also supports incremental backups, though some users complain that the software uses a lot of your computer’s resources.

Enough Cloud for a little cash

Lots of the coverage for the WD My Cloud has focused on it as a Dropbox competitor, and that’s not an inept comparison. Dropbox makes backing up mobile and PC files simple and fast, so does the My Cloud. What Dropbox lacks is terabytes of accessible space; what the My Cloud lacks is the external access speeds inherent from a true cloud service.

For the capacity and the convenience, the WD My Cloud is a solid choice for backing up files from your PCs and mobile phones on your home network. It’s big enough to serve double duty as a media server and easy enough to configure for almost anyone. Plus, there's plenty of support from WD. Add to that the ability to easily access your files from outside of your home network, and you’ve got a lot of features for not a lot of cash. The experience isn’t perfect, for sure. But for the value, the WD My Cloud makes an awfully good case for itself.

The good

• $150 gets you a $100 drive and a pretty solid $50 NAS
• Great performance for its class
• Simple to use interface makes set-up easy
• Fanless design means it’s incredibly quiet

The bad

• No per share size limits means you might fill your drive with Time Machine backups
• Not for a power user interested in micromanaging their storage
• Mobile apps lack quick file finding features
• No official Linux support

The ugly

• Your upload speeds. Without a great Internet package, using the My Cloud outside of your LAN may be less than stellar.