The WD My Cloud Home was introduced in December of 2017, more than 6 years ago. Today in 2024, the device has the same hardware as the one introduced 6 years ago, but the firmware has been updated 66 times.
Those in the know will realize that this device is near the stage of End of Life (EOL) and should be considered deprecated in the eyes many and a new model introduced, but that is not the way for Western Digital considering the situation the company is in.
It is therefore surprising that the My Cloud Home is the number 1 best seller in NAS on Amazon, in January of 2024. This is in no small part due to the innumerable updates available for the device that has kept the device relatively safe in the intervening years even with the 10 day self-imposed server outage in early April 2023 in which no user data on their My Cloud Home were breached by hackers.
Another factor for its popularity is that the My Cloud Home is still one of the cheapest and easiest personal cloud storage to set up under the right condition. You will hear horror stories in some cases about how difficult it was to set up, but in general, with the average ISP and router in the USA and Canada, this unit can be activated relatively quickly.
There are three caveats for the potential My Cloud Home emptor that he should bear in mind:
- The hardware is old and high performance or new functionality is not to be expected.
- The hard disks used in the low end My Cloud Home are SMR drives ill suited for server use and the device will not survive much longer than the two year warranty if it is used as a heavy duty media server or business server.
- Those who are going to add multi-users to the My Cloud Home should be aware that even though multi-users functionality is available, this is not a business class server and data loss for some users has been reported when ‘Clear Device Settings’ was performed.
