If anyone has found themselves here researching the products, DO NOT BUY THIS! WD’s attempt to make things more user friendly has led to a hideously unfriendly system that barely lets you do anything with it. I have used prior WD products as extended hard drives. Could easily share files and stream content from them through my Local connection. The My Cloud Home completely prevents that unless you’re using Plex.
It’s absurd that they have limited the functionality to such an extreme degree. Why not just add the “user friendly” changes, but allow for the continuing functionality that has worked so well for years? Absolutely insane. Won’t be buying ANY WD products again, and I urge some product researchers, you’re wiser than I was because I was stupid enough to trust WD and not research this new product, stay away from this.
Whilst I have empathy with your general opinion that the WD MYCloud Home leaves a lot to be desired and that WD’s attempt to improve it has been hideous, your statement concerning sharing and streaming files is completely untrue.
I very successfully stream files to an external media player device (using Kodi) from the public folder using SMB.
I totally concur with the original poster. The WD My Cloud Home 4 TB that I was given (if I purchased it myself I would have returned it for a refund) is the worst storage device I have ever used in 25 years of working in the IT industry. It consistantly goes offlne for no apparent reason. I’ve done all the “tricks”; DHCP reservation, gigabit switch port, etc. etc. It has shocking apps and user interface, and if you delete anything from it, there is no undelete. My recommendation is to buy a proper storage device from Synology of which I have used many, and own 3.
I sympathize with your feelings. I can do some things with this drive by cannot use a single one of WD’s tools supposedly built for it. WD Discovery - doesn’t work. WD Sync - doesn’t work. WD Backup - doesn’t work. Been searching in vain to find answers to why WD’s own tools won’t recognize the drive. That said, I do have it mapped so it shows up in File Explorer. Loses connection at random times but better than nothing. This device was given to me when Best Buy lost all the files on my laptop while working on it. I would never have kept it otherwise. If anyone can help with WD Discovery or any of the other tools, let me know!
