WD 40 TB My Cloud EX4100 Expert Series 4-Bay Network Attached Storage

Excellent product, bought with some trepidation as I am not an IT guru. Also purchased 4 x 4TB WD Red disks which fitted without issues. This unit is sturdily built using mainly sheet metal and once fitted with disks weighs a significant amount. Shouldn't have worried about the set-up as using the UI and My Cloud software made setting the RAID configuration and loading my files very easy. Now running as a home NAS with several TB's of Movies plus more TB's of photo's and music all served up to my Amazon Fire TV using the Plex media server. Usage to date (2wks): so far has proven unobtrusive, fast, reliable and quiet.

This is a very good solid NAS drive. The case is metal with a gloss black plastic front. Drives are easy to install and the setup options are very well explained. I configured the NAS system to use RAID 1. Half the disk storage, but one drive is automatically copied to the other drive. Alternatively you can configure individual multiple volumes, one very large volume or a mixture of configurations. The system requires a minimum of one 3.5 hard drive. When first powered on the NAS system cooling fans are on full speed (quite noisy). This helps with clearing any accumulated dust from the drive bays. After about a minute the fan speed drops to a much slower speed which is whisper quiet (hard drive activity is louder than the fans). The blue LCD on the front panel contains very useful information about the system config and operation. Being able to see the IP address, system name, status, temperature and fan speed are very useful. The system has two Gigabit Ethernet posts and two 3.1 USB ports, so you have a choice of connections. The front 3.1 USB can be configured for automatic back-ups when another drive is plugged in.

A tidy little NAS drive but corners cut in a number of places (review of diskless version). Let’s start with fitting the HDDs. Annoying, The slots for the HDDs are spring loaded and there are no trays to guide in your expensive HDDs. Result? Slotting in 4 HDDs against the stiff springs and closing the clips resulted in a curious situation where only 2 of the HDD lights came on when I turned it on. What? Half of my ultra expensive brand new NAS drives are faulty? Nope. After much head scratching I found that if you “just” slide the HDDs in and close the door it is quite possible that the HDD is not aligned with the SATA receiver on the backplane. Frustrating but amazingly it did not mangle the drive or the backplane connector. Trick is to turn the NAS drive on it’s side and use the weight of the HDD to slide it in so gravity keeps it aligned with the backplane and all is well. The slots are much wider than the height of a “standard” drive so it is maddeningly easy to miss-align the HDDs. I bought a 2nd 4100 for an SSDx4 NAS. More problems. No HDD caddy means you stand no chance of fitting SSDs in there. Amazon came to the rescue with some perfect fit “ORICO 2.5 to 3.5 Inch Hard Drive Adapter” thingies. These turn your 2.5” drives into perfect-fit 3.5” drives. Best part of £40 lost there. Hmmm. All problems would have been solved if you could bolt the drives into a cradle and slide it in. But that may have added £2 to the build cost so I guess that’s why they don’t do it no more. Web interface is fine. A little slow but I guess it is a cheaper end NAS (or perhaps not – “Expert Series”?). Plugging a USB drive into the NAS gives you the option to share it via the NAS network share. Clever. More clever would be a file explorer within the interface pages so you could move the 7TB of data from the USB drive straight to a NAS folder. But you can’t (as far as I can tell). So you unplug the USB drive, plug it into your PC and leave the network to grind away with your PC running for 3 days (no joke) while it copies from USB to NAS via your PC. Hmm. File transfer speed seems fine (RAID 5) on a 1gig network. I give it 3.5 stars but I guess it will have to be 4 as I am feeling generous. In summary – nice, with reservations.

Was very easy to setup, works with various disc drives. Had one glitch where drive looked like it reset itself, but just needed a reboot and all was fine.

Bought the 4*4TB version in Oct-2016 Initially I was pleased with this, which was my first NAS (after a single disk "MyBook" network drive). It was relatively easy to set up and use in RAID 5. I also used it as a music-server. However, as others have noted, there have been security issues over the years and apps and features removed or made unavailable and increasingly technical problems. Eventually it failed and I lost all data (but luckily I kept up-to-date backups. The Good – * Easy to set-up (especially if you are a beginner) * Easy remote access * Easy to set up as music/public shares as well as password protected private shares * Back-ups to USB-3 drives easy to set up (and when it failed the back-up USB-3 HD was up-to-date and recoverable.) The Bad – * Security issues with remote access kept being announced and new security patches. Eventually I disconnected remote access (I always had remote admin access disabled). The latest is an update to My Cloud OS 5, required (Nov 2021) for which I have been getting reminders. * Mapped shares regularly dropping and the device having to be restarted and remapped. * Similarly with the Network (in Windows 10) - regular loss of access or not recognised. Not enough to be really annoying but enough not to be reliable. The really, really bad – * One drive failed. No warning just a red light. But it is Raid 5, right? * Hot swap the failed drive with a freshly bought Red+ drive, and another drive fails so the rebuild of the Raid fails too! * Try a cold swap, after all I have a back-up so I can reinstall the data. Nope, one drive fails and then another. But a different second drive!!! In other words it is telling me that three drives failed almost simultaneously, except one that is faulty now seems OK? * Start again with a replaced, new drive. No-go. * Finally, to add insult to injury the fan fails so I have a constant red light. Apparently sourcing a replacement fan is difficult if not impossible (Google it). However, by this time I have had enough with the unreliability. I had hoped for more than five years' life. (Contrast the single-drive MyBook is still going strong after 8 years, but only as a network drive, no external access). By all accounts five years for a NAS is about right, although I should have assumed that that was for the drives, not the box. I have now replaced it with a QNAP twin-drive NAS. More difficult to set-up (even with the extensive help, but YouTube helped). However, the variety of apps, etc. customisation and general flexibility far exceeds WD! Since setting it up it has (touch wood) run more reliably and seamlessly than the My Cloud EX4100 ever did.

Wife’s iPhone was topped up with pictures of our children so it wouldn’t update. We’ve put 3 x 1TB drives in, with a Raid 5 setup, so 2TB useable. Used a Windows PC for the initial setup and update to latest software and now use the app on iPhone to backup to the drive. If you leave the app open on the phone it seems to just back up when it has WiFi so takes no effort to ensure all photos are backed up to the drive. Overall very happy with this. It’s easy to set up, easy to use and sits quietly next to the router keeping our pictures safe on a Raid 5 array.

This NAS is a bit feature-lite compared to Asustor, Q-nap or Synology devices. No firewall and no 2-factor authentication. Limited amount of apps and under-powered in terms of system memory at only 2Gb which struggles with transcoding movies in Plex with no upgrade possible. I replaced it with an Asustor AS6704T in less than a year to get more features and apps and just use this for back-ups but it is quite expensive to use just for that. I recommend you look at the data sheet and know exactly what you want a NAS for and be sure that this deviceis is sufficient before you splash out over £800 for the 16Tb (4x4Tb) model Comes with WD Red NAS harddrives which is a positive point. One very annoying glitch in the OS5 remote access sotware - even though you can grant indivividual users access to only certain folders and that's all they see in the file area, if any user goes into the photos tab with their login, they can see ALL photos on the NAS whether they are in folders they have access to or not. This means that any photos you might not want all users to see must not be saved in any folder, public or private on the NAS. You have been warned!

I bought this exactly two years ago, and I've been saving up to get a replacement for quite a while now. It was VERY easy to install and set-up - although the browser interface on my PC can be very slow - and inserting and removing hard drives is very quick and simple (so simple that I kept thinking something must have gone wrong, only to find it working perfectly!). It's the perfect size and shape for a smallish desk. It would be fantastic if not for ... There's one single, large fan at the back. Any issue with that fan, however temporary, effectively takes out the whole server. And even when it isn't failing, it's often making so much noise trying not to over-heat, that I have to switch it off. It's off most of the time now, which isn't what I needed. It's a shame because otherwise it would be AMAZING value for money. Buy one with two fans at the rear - I intend to!

C'est le mot qui convient, ce NAS est vraiment très bien pour mes sauvegardes. Pour info: Au départ le NAS est équipé de 2 disques de 4To, il reste donc 2 emplacements libre pour ajouter des disques.

Estoy encantado! Es una de las mejores inversiones que he hecho. El aparato es estéticamente correcto, no demasiado grande. No es ruidoso, muy poco cuando arrancan los discos, pero realmente son los discos que producen ruido. La interfaz de usuario es muy muy sencilla. Se instala en 2 minutos. Cumple a la perfección su cometido, tanto copias de seguridad (TimeMachine) o como servidor para contenido multimedia. Es estupendo.

Pas de défaut majeur. Facile d'utilisation.

work as expect .. 👍 24 hours delevery ..👍

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