Happy with My Cloud but dead end product?

Legacy Products My Cloud OS 3
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I’m mostly happy with the 4t my cloud that I’ve had for less than a year. Its reliable. I bought it to not only be a media server but get me out of using dropbox, onedrive etc. The problem is that its advertised as such( a cloud replacement) but Wd implementation of these features is lacking. Ive had to make do with cumbersome workarounds.

Recently I was emailed a survey from Wd about experiences with the my cloud and what features I like or feel are missing. It sure got my hopes up that some new features would be coming soon. Now however I see all these updates going on with the Mirror and other devices from Wd including Plex and even a dropbox app, but nothing for the basic mycloud! 

Did I buy a dead end product that wd has no hope of updating?

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Absolutely, it was a dead-end product as soon as you bought it; it replaced the WD-Live before it. As a product, I’ll be happy if they provide a firmware that fixes the few problems as it is, but other then that I expect to buy a new Cloud in another year or so,  mainly for the larger size hard drive. I do have my eyes on the 6TB Cloud and 6TB USB but I think the 8TB single hard drives are coming out soon so maybe I’ll wait.

The problem with all NAS systems is the largest hard drive support. Most of them has a built-in Bios that supports a Max size of 4TB before it was 2TB then 3TB and now they all have problems with the newer 6TB drives; which means that all the NAS drives are outdated as soon as you buy them. 

So the nice thing about WD Clouds is that the NAS part of it is almost free in comparison to entry QNAP which costs about $200-$300 without drives. When I bought my 4TB Cloud, the price was cheaper than a bare Red WD 4TB drive; thus I got my Cloud Enclosure for free.

In regards to additional features, there is really very little you need with NAS devices. As long as they serve files, provide a nice little app that allows us to listen to music, watch some movies, upload/download our photos, we are pretty much set. Features like the running additional apps like torrents, serve movies directly from the drive are un-necessary as we have our computers to do all that. With a dual 800Mhz CPUs, already the WDs are maxed out for what they do. 

To WD, just fix the firmware so it runs smoothly, sleep when ask to sleep and we will be happy.

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doobzz wrote:

I’m mostly happy with the 4t my cloud that I’ve had for less than a year. Its reliable. I bought it to not only be a media server but get me out of using dropbox, onedrive etc. The problem is that its advertised as such( a cloud replacement) but Wd implementation of these features is lacking. Ive had to make do with cumbersome workarounds.

Recently I was emailed a survey from Wd about experiences with the my cloud and what features I like or feel are missing. It sure got my hopes up that some new features would be coming soon. Now however I see all these updates going on with the Mirror and other devices from Wd including Plex and even a dropbox app, but nothing for the basic mycloud! 

Did I buy a dead end product that wd has no hope of updating?

To answer your question of did you buy a dead end product. Yes you did. Most products, when purchased, are ultimately dead end products. Manufacturers (or software companies) may fix certain errors with their products but they rarely add new features to that product. If you were expecting the product to do something that it doesn’t, or you need some feature it doesn’t support out of the box, then you purchased the wrong product. The Mirror is a completely separate device designed to meet a (slightly) different market need than the WD My Cloud.

There very well could be reasons, like due to the processor used on the WD My Cloud or other hardware limitations, why they have not bother to add “features” like Plex or Dropbox to the WD My Cloud Firmware. Or its possible they’d rather not take sales away from another WD product that does support Plex or Dropbox.

The WD My Cloud is a relatively low cost product designed to do one or two specific tasks (NAS and DLNA) and it generally accomplishes those tasks. As evidenced by the posts in this forum there are addional features one can add by hacking their WD My Cloud. And other companies such as Silicondust (HDHomeRun) apparently will have modules that can be added to the WD My Cloud to add new features. Plex or Dropbox could choose to add their functionality to the base WD My Cloud devices but apparently have chosen not to.

If one takes note of the  Plex NAS Compatibility document they’d see that while certain more advanced WD My Cloud devices (like the Mirror) are supported all of them either do not support video transcoding or one or two models (because of the processor used) might support only 720p video transcoding. The ability to transcode video is a major feature of Plex. WIthout it, the software looses much of its usefullnes (at least for me). It, again for me, becomes just another glorified UI interface for a media server with some nice features.

There are a whole host of features I’d love to see WD fix or add to the WD My Cloud UI and the various WD apps (Smartware, WD Photo, WD My Cloud Desktop, etc) to enhance the usability of the WD My Cloud and give the end user much more control over the shared folders and Twonky media server. For example, the simple fact that there is no sublevel “share” folder control through the UI is mind boggling to down right stupid. But the fact remains that for a basic low cost NAS and DLNA media server, the WD My Cloud probably works just fine for most people.

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To answer your question of did you buy a dead end product. Yes you did. Most products, when purchased, are ultimately dead end products.

That’s pretty much what I was going to say…

The only real exceptions to this philosophy are computers, where new programs and apps are developed, often by third parties.

I bought the MyCloud for the following reasons:

i) I needed a bigger disk to store my media

ii) I wanted my media to be accessible without having to have the PC running all the time

iii) I wanted an always-on file server for my local wired and wireless network

iv) I thought remote access might be nice to play with

v) it was the cheapest way to buy a 4TB drive…

Perhaps v) should really be ii)…

The MyCloud, having been carefully fettled, just about manges i) to iii). I don’t use iv) because my uplink rate doesn’t support my media, and I’m wary of the security.

It would be nice if ii) and iii) were implemented a bit better, with more control that doesn’t require Linux admin skills and SSH login, and didn’t break every time the thing reboots.

Whilst I admire the work done to port various utilities to the MyCloud (e.g. to make it into more of an autonomous media centre), there are other ways of doing that with various computers I have around the house.

Practically all electronics is obsolete the moment you buy it…

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cpt_paranoia wrote:

 

The only real exceptions to this philosophy are computers, where new programs and apps are developed, often by third parties.

True, just like with the WD My Cloud, the computer’s ability to run that software (or new software) is limited by their hardware. While there are some attempts being made to add features (not supported by WD) to the My Cloud firmware there is ultimately a wall that will be reached due to the limitations of the existing WD My Cloud hardware.

There are other NAS devices by other manufacturers out there which support adding extra modules with new features. But those devices are generally more (much, much more) expensive and are designed for a different use compared to the entry level My Cloud devices.

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Still the problems not fixed