EX2100, Fast enough?

I’m using WD My Cloud which is way too slow. I’m planning to buy either EX2100 or DL2100. I will use background scan of WD Antivirus Essential, stream full HD movies, do file transferring, link aggregation and RAID 0 mode. I want to achieve the speed of the RAID 0 of 2 drives not being slowed down by CPU or RAM. Does anyone know that EX2100 is enough for that case or should I go for DL2100?

Who knows, other than those who put them side by side and send them through their paces? The price diff is minimal compared to the price of the same enclosed drives; the actual price diff between the empty boxes is around $100 or so. Just spend the extra to be sure you bought the fastest of the two and move on to other issues. You will want to spend another $25 or so to beef up the internal memory, too.

I have a DL2100 w/two, 4 TB drives inside in RAID 1. My fastest file transfer speed is 113 MB/sec between DL2100 and a USB3 drive on my i7 laptop; a MB or so less than the advertised spec. Flawlessly streams HD videos. And, yes, I noticed the improvement over streaming from other drives; especially on tablets which need all the speed of delivery of video they can get.-- even over 5G. Any speed issues are from the tablet. (iPad fine, Kindle is slower due to different processors in tablets.)

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Thanks a lot for information. So do u normally use up to like 700MB of RAM when you are streaming? If I buy DL2100, I might buy extra RAM as well. As u said, it’s not that expensive, but if normal RAM usage is lower than 500MB when u are streaming, I might have to consider it a little more. By the way, do u use WD Antivirus Essential as background scan? Does it affect u a lot?

The supplied 1GB of memory included in the 2100 models is enough for the “average” user streaming one movie to one device, but if additional devices and movies are streamed at same time it could become an issue. Installing apps on the NAS takes up more memory. Before and after installing the 4GB memory card I could check memory usage and see there was a lot more headroom with the additional memory. It is a basic 4GB memory module card that only cost me under $30 from Amazon, so well worth the minimal extra cost.

Here is a WD link telling about recommended cards and how to install them. I bought the first Kingston one on the list for the DL2100.
http://support.wdc.com/KnowledgeBase/answer.aspx?ID=12943

Look for earlier forum discussions regarding the EX and DL models where these memory cards were being discussed by users.

Thanks, I think I will add additional RAM just to make sure. Also, do u use WD Antivirus Essential as background scan? Does it affect u a lot?

Yes, anti virus app is free for the NAS and I use it. Never causes any issues, and I appear to have it always on. I really do not need it, since all my media is home grown by me. I do not do torrents, but if one does, or gets files from others, the app can be quite useful.

The link to the 4GB ram I bought from Amazon for my DL2100 – $20!

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hi i have an EX2100 - purchased in 2016, the 1gb memory can no longer handle the nas like it use to, even though i have one app running, i do want to upgrade the ram, but unsure what the limits are, how do i know what ram to buy, where to buy it from and the max i can use on my nas ?