External hdd

HI, I have the WD my cloud 4Tb. Thinking of plugging in a USB hard drive to increase storage space. Are there any special requirements ? or will any usb 3 drive be OK ?
Any ideas what to buy,
Thnx, Normski

There are no “special” requirements. There is no recommended list of tested USB hard drives with the My Cloud. Just about any USB external hard drive or USB flash/pen drive should work. Just be aware of some limitations. If you buy a drive that features encryption, the My Cloud does not officially offer a way to decrypt (or unlock) such a hard drive. You would have to decrypt or unlock the drive prior to attaching it to the My Cloud. And when you attach a USB hard drive to the My Cloud’s USB port the entire USB drive shows up as a single Share. This means any subfolders on that hard drive will inherit any settings you perform on the main Share, like setting it to Private or enabling/disabling media serving.

There are a few of us who have experienced issues with the My Cloud not properly mounting a USB drive. There are various workarounds if one encounters such an issue. Doing a forum search, magnifying glass icon upper right, will yield past discussions from those (including myself) who had trouble with certain USB drives.

Thanks for the info, I am a photographer, main hobby being macro, and as cameras get better, mega pixels get bigger, hard drives fill up faster.
So my 4TB wd mycloud is what I use as a second back up, and my thoughts were, as my first back up is getting full I would plug another drive into wd mycloud. transfer pictures to the cloud, then transfer again to the ext drive. So it being seen as one single drive would not be a problem, so long as it is recognisable from the wd drive, eg with it’s own name.
Life was so simple when we took our film to the chemist for developing…