I hope that question has not been solved yet, but I couldn’t find any answer yet.
I would like to request the WD team to integrate usb ethernet drivers into the my cloud OS5 Debian.
The gbit interface is truly outdated by now and it would be really great if we could just plug in a 2.5 gbit or 5 gbit USB adapter. QNap has already shown that it works.
Link aggregation is of course an alternative, but I found it to be very cumbersome and requires one to transition to 10 Gbit managed switches that are very expensive, energy consuming and quite unnecessary in a private or SMB setting.
Is there any chance you would consider adding the feature to our PR4100’s?
I didn’t buy the adapter yet, not knowing which chipset would be supported by MyCloud OS.
Most 2.5 gbit adapters use Realtek chipsets, QNap has a Maxwell. Not sure what chipset is used by the PR4100, would guess Realtek, so maybe easier to use a Realtek usb 2.5 gbit
“Bleeding edge” are not words I would associate with the WD NAS lineups.
Really?
For giggles, I went to Amazon and typed “router”. Only one reference to 2.5gb wired ethernet - - on a $600 router that had 21% 1 star reviews. (and I am pretty sure the 2.5gb was for the WAN port, not the main intranet ports). I saw a few routers that were not even 1gb capable.
Honestly, I think most “home” users are wireless these days. . . .
It’s 2025, and while things have gotten cheaper and faster, nothing has changed with the PR4100’s NIC options.
I highly doubt that BusyBox v1.30.1 (A/K/A: OS5) will ever support a network dongle on the PR4100’s USB3 Type-A ports
But, even if it did, the Admin GUI (currently) shows no support for a 3rd network interface.
Who knows, maybe a new NIC menu would show up on the USB port if it was detected; otherwise, even if the OS does see the 3rd NIC you’d have to do your own configuration of it through the command line.
Keep in mind that the OS protects itself from “corrupted files” by overwriting them with the originals on reboot. So if you did get the 3rd NIC running, it may not survive a reboot.
I configured my switches to use channel bonding 802.3ad (Mode 4 channel bonding) for active/active and set the PR4100 to that mode on its two 1GbE ports. That’s not a great work around, but it gives a slight boost in throughput for multi-threaded transfers (like robocopy or rsync) but don’t help single threaded operations.
