Hi All,
I’m new to this WD My Cloud Home product.
Previously I use My Book Live Duo, which going well for me until now they had a security issue where others can wipe out the drive remotely if open to internet, even without password etc.
Western Digital offer Trade-In program where people can buy My Cloud Home or My Cloud EX2 Ultra.
I only need a basic drive so the My Cloud Home seem ok, until I read some info about it and it’s not a real NAS, meaning you need internet to access the drive, even the drive on your LAN and you only use it in your LAN.
There is a Public share folder that you can use as a LAN share but it open to anyone on the LAN, no username/password or anything.
To the experience people who’re using this, has this Share function been updated and you can set username/password for this Share ?
Other thing is the speed if using on the “internet NAS drive” account, I heard t’s much slower than the normal offline public share ?
Thanks all
Hi @hunter_sig,
This is to inform you that there is no user and password settings for public folders.
Please refer below link to check My Cloud Home Private User Space and Public Share Access:
If you are connected the with gigabit router directly using an ethernet cable then you wont face any issue with the speed.
If you can - I advise you to avoid My Could Home family at any cost (but I don’t know about My Cloud EX2 Ultra - they may be alright).
Maybe if you going for smaller single HDD drive, it may be ok, but I had 12 TB model for 3 years and it is worst piece of technology I have ever owned (specifically WDBMUT0120JWT-EESN model). It is slow, unreliable, constantly looses data and connection and indeed you have to have it connected to the internet to access it. It is partially NAS, because once it is connected to internet you can have WD discovery app on your PC/MAC and it will transfer files locally without going through internet.
As for functionality, it is fairly simple and easy to use. You can pretty much go and create different accounts which only requires e-mail, but that is where functionality ends. You have no stats of what which account uses, or restrict the size of it. This thing is pretty much meant to be “family cloud” device and it’s only strength is that you can access it as if it is public cloud, just very slow and horrible at that
Speed is limited to 1Gbps, so ~125MBs, but trust me - it is far far slower than that in reality. I have achieved speeds of ~90-100MBs when moving huge compressed files e.g. 25GB .iso files, big archives or big 4k video file, but if you just have 300 pictures from you holidays (which I don’t consider small files ~3-10MB) and you just drag and drop that folder it will take forever… speeds like 500Kbps (0.0625MB/s) are not uncommon and if you get even 10MB/s consider your self lucky!
Thanks @Linas and @Keerti_01 for your replies.
This look like mixed experiences with speed even transfer files in the LAN environment.
Shame that this product is not support LAN secured share and have to rely on the internet to be able to operate.
Well… there are 3 distinct speeds to consider here:
- Is the Ethernet interface. Most home users will have 1Gbps (Gigabit) connection and that = 125MB/s transfer rate. This is not an issue with WD drives, it is limit of the Ethernet cable, any NAS on Gigabit enthernet will have same transfer speed. 10Gbps connections at home are still rare and expensive (I looked at it myself and just could not justify the cost) and even then it would be hard to find 10Gbps NAS. Most of the time this would require storage server which is magnitude of times more costly.
Note here - firewire and thunderbolt drives are available with speeds of up-to 3200Mbps (400MB/s) and 40Gbps (5GB/s) respectively, but those are more like external storage and less like a NAS. - Is the drive speed itself… most of hard drives on SATA3 will be able to do something like 150-250MB/s read/write when copying “large files” that is anything over 1MB in general i.e. when copying HD pictures one should be able to expect for hard drive to reach it’s maximum speed.
- Is drive latency and seek time, this is difficult one to explain. Spinning drives in general will be much slower than say SSDs, but again most of the time this will be measured in milliseconds. Generally - seek times and latency is what makes small file transfer much slower even if it takes just milliseconds.
So what is the issue with WD Home Cloud Duo? In terms of first point I think it works as expected - so the speeds are hard limited to 125MB/s by Ethernet. That is fine and that is what I expected when buying it. However, what I did not expect was that seek times will be so terrible. There is no way to test precise seek times because WD decided to us proprietary KDDFS format (rather than NTFS or exFAT), but I am estimating seek time could be in seconds… and if there is conflict like duplicate file name even minutes. What is even worse that, this affects not only small files, but even what I consider large and very large files (100MB+ or 1GB+). As well it affects bot h read and write times, so you end-up with drive which has theoretical 125MB/s speed, but it never reaches in real life.
For reference - I was transferring ~ 8TB of data and it took me months to do (not joking), there were multiple instances where drive just restarted and gone offline and I had to do it again, but even considering how much time it would have taken to transfer 8TB of mixed size and type files once… it would still have been 4-6 week of continuous copying. Compare that to theoretical write speed of 125MB/s - it should have taken 18 hours. even considering network overheads etc… say in worse case scenario it could have been 100MB/s … still should have taken no more than 22 hours. Not 4-6 weeks.
This is why I am saying - if you getting like smaller single drive unit (2-4TB) and you plan is to transfer maybe 500GB at first and then another 100GB a month… it may be alright. But larger drivers are just unacceptably slow for their size. And finally, as I mentioned - this specifically applicable to My cloud home duo drive, whenever My Cloud EX2 Ultra experiences same issues I can’t say.
Thanks @Linas for the detail explanation ! I think there may be a big issue with the verification of the “private” share drive that will need internet to be able to work (for account verification) ?
From security perspective … yes there may be. I have no reason to think security is lacking at the moment, but considering that you are coming off the drive which had major security issue we know it is not impossible. As well, there are no second factor authentication either… which is kind of customary nowadays.
My Home Cloud Duo is definitely not a drive for security cautious. It is kind of sad and frankly unnecessary that WD didin’t leave an option to run this drive just on LAN. As I mentioned previously - drive is definitely capable running un LAN, as WD discovery app connects directly, but… it still needs internet to log-in…
