I am sure this question or part of this question has been asked before. If it has, please provide a good link that will explain the answer.
Like most everyone out there, I have acquired a lot of music, magazines, books, pictures, etc… and I need a place to store all of my data. My home network consists of 2 HP Mediasmart servers each one running 4 hard drives that I use to store my data. As everyone knows, the MSS servers are outdated and old. These MSS still work and they are reliable but I need to increase my storage capacity.
With that said, I am looking at the WD My Cloud storage as a viable option to replace the MSS servers. However, I have some questions about the My Clouds.
Does the My Clouds have any power management associated with them? I would like to be able to put the My Clouds to sleep from 10pm to 10am every night. I would like the My Clouds to put themselves to sleep.
Would I be able to have 2 or 3 My Clouds properly configured to run on my network? I know you can run multiple servers on a network so I assume the same goes for My Clouds.
unfortunately the sleeping function is not on a scheduler nor does it work reliably but with that said, it does work. If not access within 10 minutes, the drive goes to sleep but will wake up throughout the night to dig through your media files.
you can have as many cloud devices as you like and with the latest Cloud it has a USB 3.0 port on the back allowing you to connect any USB 3.0 hard drive, however as I have found the best match for this is the WD Mybook which will give you speeds of up to 40MB/s writes and 70MB/s reads through the USB 3.0 port. Any other USB 3.0 device seems to get about 18-25 MB/s writes and 45MB/s reads; go figure.
There are a few major bugs with the WD cloud at this time, but if you are willing to SSH into the linux OS you can work around most of the problems except the sleeping one. One major problem is the lock up when initial loading the drive with lots of media.
There is a workaround, however if you are using the device for DLNA, Twonky, itunes or even remote Photo browsing, the indexing will take days, if not weeks.
However if you can get the drive on sale, it is an extraordinary NAS device that has great gigabit speeds of 40-45MB/s writes and 70-80MB/s reads; miliage will vary on your network.
I highly recommend WD, but there is a learning curve to the device at this time due to the bugs which require you to learn linux.
Thanks for the response. Would you recommend WD My Book Live since My Cloud doesn’t seem to be stable? I like the WD products but it doesn’t appear that My Cloud is something that will work for me in this situation.
The obvious question, if “MSS servers are working and reliable then why do you want to change things”. Both servers have a total of less than 2tb of storage capacity. Yes, I could add larger drives to both servers to give me the boost of capacity. However, the servers are outdated and nobody is making any new ADD-INs for Windows Home Server. Overall, Windows Home Server V1 is old and outdated.
The problem with the MSS servers is that it is difficult to move files and data around from one computer to next. Also, it hard to move data from server to server. Usually, I get a permission error when you try to copy files from one server to the other. That is not the point of this post nor is this the place to talk about MSS servers.
Getting back to my original questions, would My Book Live be a suitable option for what I want to do?
What are the major differences between My Book Live and My Cloud? Are they basically the same with some minor changes? Maybe the interface is different or some differences under the hood.
The live is just an older hardware of the Cloud really and both suffers from the same problems. So, no, don’t go with the live.
For the money, the Cloud is a great value for a NAS in fact it will run circles around your MSS servers. It is the fastest NAS that I’ve tested for both the device itself and the USB 3.0 port (although it seems to work better with a WD MyBook).
However it is a device that has growing pains and users from the WD live has managed to find solutions to problems that WD will eventually iron out (maybe).
It is a terrific device that deserve a couple of weeks for you to play with it; just make sure that the store that you bought your WD Cloud allows returns. If you are lucky, it might just work out for you like it did for me back a few years ago with the live.
Not everyone will notice the problems, in fact I didn’t with the live as it sat in my closet grinding away on indexing all my movies for two years.
What are the major differences between My Book Live and My Cloud? Are they basically the same with some minor changes? Maybe the interface is different or some differences under the hood.
the Cloud is faster, with dual processors and has an external USB 3.0 connector allowing external drive growth. Almost the same software functions with just slightly different names, same problems though and same linux.
