Miscellaneous Aspects and Final Words

The Western Digital My Cloud EX2 is a 2-bay NAS, and most users are going to use it in a RAID-1 configuration. Hence, we performed all our expansion / rebuild testing as well as power consumption evaluation with the unit configured in RAID-1. The disks used for benchmarking (Western Digital WD4000FYYZ) were also used in this section. The table below presents the average power consumption of the unit as well as time taken for various RAID-related activities.

Western Digital My Cloud EX2 Expansion and Rebuild / Power Consumption
Activity Duration Avg. Power Consumption
     
Idle (Diskless) / Sleep (Disks Spun Down)   5.16 W
4TB Single Disk Initialization Immediate 14.93 W
4TB JBOD to 4TB RAID-1 (Expand from 1 to 2 Disks) 8h 19m 8s 27.54 W
4TB RAID-1 Rebuild (Replace 1 of 2 Disks) 8h 16m 30s 27.78 W

Coming to the business end of the review, the WD My Cloud EX2 serves to round up Western Digital's initial foray into the consumer NAS market. The firmware, despite being rich in features, has a few hiccups that WD has already recognized. The performance is middling and the third-party app ecosystem is just getting started. That said, applications of interest to the average consumer (P2P / FTP / WordPress / IceCast etc.) are already available. The cloud access and mobile apps are the positives, and those aspects are definitely attractive to the average consumer walking through, say, the Best Buy doors. The My Cloud mobile app also integrates popular third-party cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Google Drive and Sky Drive.

The platform for the EX2 seems to be better than the EX4. So, it looks like there is scope for performance improvement in the firmware. We are hoping that Western Digital is in this market for the long haul - they need to build out this product line and address the performance issue before the My Cloud lineup can be recommended to demanding consumers with above-average workloads. The firmware updates that have come out for the EX4 since the unit was launched gives us confidence that the EX2 will fare better in the days to come than what our review found today.

The Western Digital My Cloud EX2 is available for purchase today, with the diskless, 4 TB, 6 TB and 8 TB versions retailing for $200, $370, $470 and $570 respectively.

Multi-Client Performance - CIFS
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  • hlmcompany - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link

    The article states: "The Western Digital My Cloud EX2 is bundled with a 36 W(12V @ 3A) adapter. A power cord (customized to the country of sale) and a network cable are included in the package." The EX2 units do not include a power cord. The 36 watt power adapter is a fixed-plug wallwart-style unit. The comment about a power cord seems to be left-over from the EX4 review.
  • ganeshts - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link

    Thanks for the note. I have fixed the relevant text.
  • redmist77 - Wednesday, March 5, 2014 - link

    I refuse to buy any product with cloud in the name.
  • romrunning - Wednesday, March 5, 2014 - link

    Well, that just kills my idea for "Cloud-soft" (tm pending) toilet paper!
  • futbol4me - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link

    One very useful non-geeky benchmark would be time machine backup performance. I have a mybook live and while it may read and write files with decent performance via afs or smb, time machine backups are almost unuseably slow.
  • teich50 - Saturday, March 8, 2014 - link

    Has anyone figured out how to perform an encrypted Time Machine backup to My Cloud? I think, by default, the Time Machine back up writes to the Guest account with no encryption, which is scary.
  • Atty - Sunday, March 9, 2014 - link

    What is your recommendation on hard drive choice? For this to be used to share and store mainly media files and stream them to various devices. Would it be worth the investment to get the re4 drives or are the red drives suitable?
  • Cybernut1 - Friday, March 21, 2014 - link

    Red drives are recommended.For a home or small office setup Re drives are overkill. Re drivesare geared towards data centers. WD recommends Red for most common uses for this product though they will support select few other drives. Here's the full list of supported drives - http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=11...
  • Cybernut1 - Friday, March 21, 2014 - link

    The couple big issues for me with this having used it for a week are:

    1) Currently the ftp functionality is broken (if you are trying to ftp from outside your local network - which is almost 100% of the time). Broken because you cannot save your external IP for passive ftp to work and that is critical. It keeps resetting the external IP value to 0.0.0.0. I have a trouble ticket open with their tech support but ETA for fix is unknown at this time.

    2) There does not seem to be any way for sftp - which is really a reason for many to get this. Even if you can get ftp to work (by going into the shell and making unsanctioned edit to the ftp configuration file), you cannot really do much about sftp. I am used to creating sftp via shell access for work - but here when you try to create an user in the embedded lightweight linux, that user cannot login to the shell no matter what privs you give that user. And without a remote way to ssh into the box, you can't do scp or sftp. So their marketing claim about "Secure FTP support" on this page -> http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=11... (click on Advanced Serving tab) is rubbish.
  • jmm317 - Thursday, June 5, 2014 - link

    I found WD My Clound EX2 and was happy because I bought this was a great idea and a perfect solution. I found the product has several problems that makes this product useless. The problem is the following. The unit CPU work 24/7 at 100% because it has issues with a process name "Convert" that tries to create thumbs to media files. The problem I´m experimenting it not an isolated case, you can find in WD Community lots of people having the same problem. WD is aware of the problem for a while and has not find a solution (firmware update) or doesn´t care.

    This problem:
    - Not been able to access the unit.
    - When you have access the unit crashes.
    - Difficulty to access files.
    - Continually crashes and need to be restart.

    WD should stop selling My Clound EX2 and start a refund process.
    Link:
    http://community.wd.com/t5/Network-Product-Ideas/T...

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