I currently have the MyCloud 4TB single drive, and after a rocky start where I lost everything, and have spent the last two weeks redownloading things from either the web, or time machine backups my current drive is starting to work like it should. However, I am quickly filling it up with multimedia and large scale files and have been giving the EX4 some heavy consideration. BUT is it work it? Is there another product that I should consider instead? One that has similar size and price range as the EX4. I really like the ease of WD, and when MyCloud does work it really does a great job.
Hello,
With the my cloud EX4 you could get up to 16TB.
Lets see what the EX4 users on this community can share with you.
I’m with you I’m tired of losing data generally due filesystem errors from Mac antiquanted filesystem HFS+
I decided to get a multi drive RAID NAS ; I got the EX4 based on price and feature sets RAID, USB3, “APPS” dual gigabit.
and filesystem in EX4.
Based upon the generally poor performance of this NAS ( well documented ) if I had to do it over, I would spend my money on a ZFS based NAS from ixsystems. Just a hare more expensive, but I belive equally powerfull box, more frequent updates supior filesystem.
I also belive if you get a IxSystems ZFS Plus, or a Drobo 5N as a Mac user ( since your using timemachine ) you’ll be VERY pleased w/ the PLEX media server app that can run on both of those boxes.
I’ll get back with you on the 11th… So far I am a bit unhappy with this unit due to the cost and effort required on my part. We’ll see what WD can come up in a couple more weeks. If not, I might just return this unit and spring a bit more money for something thats more reliable…maybe a synology unit… I just hope they fix the issues listed on these forums…
My vote is in. NO, its NOT.
Im now 90% going to dump this thing. Looking for a $ynology right now.
If you look at all 4 bay NAS on $mallN3tBuil3r:
ALL SoC-1 Marvell based platforms seem to max out around 50MBs
The best one only ranks at #43 in overal rankings and the EX4 is #52.
Average is in the 30MBs which is what I am getting (without CPU load ie unless Convert is “converting nothing”
So it seems a hardware limitation and going to be the limit of this machine.
I f we want performance, were going to have to pay for it. (or move down to a 2 bay) But this thing as buggy as it is and where it is at is not even worth the $350 MSRP. I would value in the $150-200 range of worth. (or thats what WD would have to compenste me to keep debugging it for them…)
You would be better to go with multiple 2bays with better performance. (unless you really need 4 such as myself) Checkout $mallN3tBuil3r for rankings. I almost went with a nicely performing Zyxel 325 that can be had for $140, and has some nice performance.
I had 2 weeks of troubles with this device. When i finally called customer support, they reccomended some setting changes, that i don’t understand why they weren’t defaults. Since then it has been smooth sailing. The speed is true, you will only get around 50gb/s, but now that everything is uploaded I primarily use this for timemachine backups while I am asleep anyway, or small photo transfers. In that regard it’s irrelevent.
Another unexpected hiccup is that windows 7 home premium does not allow for network backups. Ofcourse not a downside of this NAS.
I havn’t played with the apps much, or clouded my itunes yet. So no comments on that.
I havn’t tried any other NAS so i can’t reccomend it over another. Just remember that what ever you buy your going to want to raid, so you don’t lose it all with a single drive failure, so buy twice as much hdd as you think you need.
Thanks everyone for your thoughts on the subject! I am still very unsures as to what to do. I currently have the 4TB regular myCloud and had SOOOo much trouble with it untill I did a factory restore and since then things have been fine. The problem I am running into is the 4tb is small and filling up fast. I have give the 16tb EX4 some thought since I got a nice 25% promo code from WD which slashes a bit off the price, and and still gives me a lot of room.
I have 4 days to make up my mind before I make a purcahse for a larger NAS device, and the options are still in the air
If you are using this as just a place to hold back ups thats great, but if you are using it to store media and what not your going to want to raid it so that you don’t lose data, making this only a 8GB device once raided. If you are storing large files like a video store this could even be too small for your uses.
Well wish me luck! I bit the bullet this morning and purchased the 16Tb drive.
As for storage I storage I keep all my papers and projects from my undergrad to my PhD on it, and all my media(music, tv and movies). I learned about redundancy when I bought the mycloud unit and I had it 95% of the way set up and I moved some folder and it just vanished and all my movies went with it. So now I keep copies of things on multiple drives, and in the coming months I will purchase all new EHDs to store the stuff on as the ones I have are like 10 years old.
I just hope that WD reads the forums and addresses the issues that people are having with what could be a great product and soon.
With the 25% promo, you can’t really go wrong. I paid the full freight and feel like I should get paid for all the time I have spent trying to debug the issues. If I only paid $750 for the 16 TB version, I could live with all the issues. Even if the NAS could not meet my minimum needs, I could find a use for it given that I could not even buy the drives alone for that price.
Yeah that’s the only reason why I did it to be honest. I know that the first thing I will do after I turn the thing on is to do a factory restore. That seems to help with getting the kinks out of the regular MyCloud that I have.
Update teh firmware, then do the factory reset.
Thanks! Will do!
Any other suggestions as to what I should do during setup
