Are data sent around the world when fetching from a local computer?

I’M totally angry after buying a WD MyCloud Home 6TByte Device today.
With the desktop software WD Discovery I can see my new device as a network drive.
However, the device cannot be accessed without internet connection. Does it mean, when I fetch a big data item from the storage all data are sent over the internet?
This is not what I wanted, because in this case I have to pay for connection bandwidth. It cannot be that when I copy, lets say 1 GByte from the storage device to my local computer (which is in the same home network) these 1GByte are moving to some WD server and then back to my computer…if this is the case, I wasted money and I can only put the whole device in the waste bin.
It is completely silly to create such mechanism and nobody wants to send Gigabytes around the world when the data shall be used only in the local network. I feel really cheated by WD and hope to find another silly person, to which I can re-sell the device. Unbelievable what garbage WD is creating…

@michiwien22
Have you read the User Manual? It should tell you when and why you need an internet connection.

User Manual: My Cloud Home and My Cloud Home Duo (westerndigital.com)

Except it doesn’t do that and you can see the individual client throughput if your router allows you to see the processes by client ips. The internet is only used for file level user access authentication of the private user space on the kdd file system using WD servers and uses a few MB of data. The SMB (LAN Public) throughput is not limited by file level authentication but periodic WDC server authentication is required every 15 minutes or so for the local connection to stay active.

I started a backup last night. After about 3 hours the device was not reachable anymore (Windows says “device corrupt”). Other devices on the same network are reachable perfectly without any troubles. I had to make a power down by plugging out an in again. After a while I was able to re-connect again. about 20% of the backup was done the rest failed. I started it again: the same error after about 2 hours…again, all network devices work properly except the MyCloud. By the way: the data rate for writing was about 2MB/s…!!! A simple external hard disc on the Fritz-Box (a rather childish solution which cost me about 30€) which is on the same LAN segment reaches about 6MB/s and was able to handle the backup without any problems… Test was repeated several times - its a fact!

This is not what I understand as a reliable storage device - sorry when I say it is “garbage”.

I have other storage devices already using for years and nearly without any problems. However, this device is completely un-usable.

The reason why I decided for WD is the “good name” : I thought, there can nothing be wrong with a WD product - I must say this was completely wrong.

The device is going back to the shop where I bought it. Hopefully they take it back - otherwise it will end up in the electronic-waste and I invested the money for nothing. I’m usually not very quick in sending back and give things a chance, but in this case it can truly be said that I bought garbage…

I would like to warn other people not to purchase this product like me as they will be severely disappointed.

I had the bigger solution in mind (real NAS like My Cloud Pro Series) but given this bad experience, I will purchase a better (and more costly) device from another manufacturer and not from WD anymore: This is how you scare away potential customers.