My review after 5 months of EX2

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud EX2
1

Hi guys,

I just want to share with you my opinion after 5 months of using WD Mycloud EX2. So when i’ve started to check the market for a new NAS, there were ALOT of options:Qnap, Synology, WD, etc.
I’ve started to look at the price and what performance i get for it and it came down to synology and WD.
I decided to buy a WD MyCloud EX2 based on reviews, advertising and so on.
I’ve installed the WD NAS and immediately saw some things that i didn’t quite like or were under-developed for customer use. So i joined this forum and saw that there were alot of problems, the support was very limited so I got a little scared and decided that one WD EX2 was too unreliable for a stand alone device with my precious files. So i bought another EX2, the only purpose was backup for my primary NAS.
I gave suggestions to the support team, i also posted here some of them.  I really liked WD and tried to give them the chance to improve, but even so, no firmware update since december 2014, no answer to the customers about their intentions or to tell the customers that they understand us and value our opinions here.
I am starting to regret that i didn’t spent the extra money on Synology and live happy like other user posted here. Is WD concerned about hte customers that they are loosing ?

The whole thing is so unreliable especially if you try to use it outside of your network. Only thanks to my whole network enviroment i manage to do some workarounds and make it work again.
the firmware is a joke and looks like it was done by some people that do not use a NAS on their own, or they haven’t seen what the competition offers.

So what i like about EX2:

  • fast read/write ( this is only because i don’t have another NAS to compare)

  • small and elegant design

  • quiet

  • apearently easy to use

  • intuitive explanations in the GUI

  • cheaper than other competitor ( now i know why :expressionless: )

  • quality HDDs

So what i don’t like about EX2:

  • no power button. Even if WOL is available and something so simple as a power button may seem unnecessary, trust me it’s needed.

  • public folders can’t be made private ( on ex2100 it can, but firmware update for EX2 is 6 months old)

  • power scheduler is not customizable enough

  • smartphone apps are not reliable, maybe because of the ex2 's firmware. Sometimes it connects and the next time it sais that you don’t have access or permissions and you have to add the device again. Not reliable when you are away.

  • support is very limited

  • firmware is not customizable enough ( have you see Synology or Asustor ? …if not, take a good look you have enough to lean WD !! )

  • updates for EX2 stopped and no one from WD want to make an official statement about what’s going on.

  • backup works whenever it wants

  • unable to backup on a shared location except on another WD device

  • app market from ages ago with no active updating

  • for every new shared folder created, you have to create a separate backup job, because editing existing ones is impossible

  • no possibility to turn OFF .wdmc hidden folders where not needed. If you have to copy all the picture folders on another location, you will end up copying those hidden .wdmc folders aswell. If you have a few hundrets of picture folders, good luck clean that up.

  • When accessing EX2’s dashboard over internet or VPN, My cloud Services shows as turned OFF and can’t be turned on, but when i access the dashboard within the internal network, Cloud Services shows as ON. Also you can’t use tools that require Cloud Services to be turned ON, ex statistics of disk usage.

  • Dashboard can’t be accessed over VPN or any other subnet. The only workaround is to turn Cloud Access ON, even if you do not do the port forwarding on the router to actually have Cloud Access over the internet

  • FTP still has problems

  • If you have a normal backup job and you create a Sync backup job, it will not sync the existing backup, but it will create another folder and double your files on the backup target nas. Not to mantion that day 28 is the beste WD could do. What if i want to do a sync on day 30 or 31.

  • WOL is not a feature if the target is shutdown while attempting to run a backup job

  • no possibility to hide folders from users that do not have access

  • no idea is the fan is actually working or when it should be activated. Fan RPM is always 0

Like I saw a post here on the forum, what exactly did WD gave us here, some expensive HDD in a plastic box ???!! It’s not like WD is a new company that doesn’t have the money to pay some good programmers and to check out the competition. The wheel doesn’t have to be reinvented here WD, just do what others already made , but make it work.

Most likely in the near future, if WD continues like this, I will get rid of EX2s and buy a Synology.

2

Hi, I would recommend you to post this in the ideas board, however I would check there first to see if they are already posted, if so you can vote them up and add your post.

http://community.wd.com/t5/Network-Product-Ideas/idb-p/network_ideas

3

Believe me…all of them are posted there for months

4

Agreed, WD needs to refocus on the firmware for these products.  Mine does the bare minimum of what I demand, however I am disappointed that had I spend slightly more I could have a better, well rounded device that addresses remote access as well as local access.  My chief complaints are around the remote access of this device.  If you have technical users then they can use it via FTP, but my sister or dear old mother dont have a clue how to gain access to this device since it only seems to work from the WD apps intermittantly at best. And lets not even talk about secure access…

Long story short, if WD is done with the firmware here, then I will have to place mine on the market and move to QNAP or Synology.  (Bad thing is I want to keep my two 4TB drives, which means I will be selling the enclosure only.  I’m sure I wont be able to get much for the bare enclosure.)

5

I agree adicrst with all your points. And I have known the other poster in this thread, Vertech1, from pretty much the beginning of my EX2 journey in March 2014, when we both bought our EX2’s and joined the forum shortly thereafter.

I have been able to squeeze much more out of my EX2 by hacking (moddng) the firmware and doing several non-WD approved things - from killing their SSH shell and running one that allows other SSH users beyond the official sanctioned one, to enabling SFTP, enabling logging for SFTP, SSH and HTTP, creating a log rotation mechanism, running latest Joomla and not the ancient version that WD bundles and doesn’t provide a way to upgrade to the latest one, etc.

But the thing is several of these things (but not custom SSH user - that one seems to alwas be limited to just one admin user in all major NAS vendors’ products, be it QNAP, Synology, etc.) are standard on other competitor’s products. Granted QNAP and Synology are mostly premium priced products but they both have in the past year introduced low end ARM-based NAS servers. I own a high end QNAP NAS besides the EX2 and am definitely happy with the QNAP. The EX2 on the other hand does seem sorely lacking in features - I guess you get what you pay for. It can be turned into something more useful if you are willing to get your hands dirty in the firmware code and compile your custom firmware, like I did and recently another user (TCWORLD) did, but for most folks those custom mods are going to be out of reach.

And this forum could have been an excellent way for WD’s tech support to reach out to users who need help but unfortunately this is primarily an user-to-user forum with more experienced users volunteering their time to help out other users. I was doing that quite a bit last year but I haven’t been able to do as much of late. Though in defense of WD, this forum model is identical to what I observed at QNAP’s and Synology forum…and when I last checked QNAP’s forum a few months ago, it was in taters because of unhappiness of several of QNAP’s most enthisastic volunteer users. Same thing I notice with this forum. Since WD isn’t willing to spend money in tech support folks who can dispense tech support help in the forum, many questions either are unanswered or are answered with a pointless welcome message by a WD forum admin who will welcome the user to the forum and inform them that they don’t have experience in the specific thing the user is asking but will say, let’s see if another advanced user can shed some answers. Sigh - I roll my eyes everytime I see that response :slight_smile: It would have been better to have left those posts unanswered rather than WD forum mods try to give a semblence that most forum questions get answered.

Well, for what it’s worth, I would recommend folks to go for QNAP rather than Synology - they both offer more advanced featureset than that offered by WD’s My Cloud firmware. But before you spend a good amount of money on another NAS server, I would recommend you look into XPEnology for fans of Synology. Basically XPEnology is the Synology’s firmware running on your own hardware, not on Synology’s. So you could repurpose an old computer to be a Synology-like NAS…or even run it on Virtualbox if you like :slight_smile: Check out more about XPEnology from this blog post from  just yesterday  http://xpenology.org/xpenology-explained/

Also, if anyone is considering jumping ship to a competitor’s NAS, I do urge you to check out their forums as well. You can glean a lot of problems in their product lines from that before sinking money down another NAS. And don’t overlook the two other quite good but not top-shelf NAS brands - Thecus and Asustor. Both have narrowed their gaps with the two leading brands, Synology and QNAP. I guess WD will continue to thrive in the budget market selling underpowered ARM processor NAS servers. If WD could have improved their firmware and added more features (or fixed some continuing issues that I didn’t experience but seem to see frequently posted about here - like backup issues) then it woul have been a truly compelling product in the budget NAS market. Too bad it doesn’t look like it will.

1 Like
6

Hi guys, i’m glad that the two of you agree with me on this matter.

I know about the expenology, also freeNAS, however i did not want to turn my test lab HP54GL microserver into a nas and that’s why i wanted a dedicated device.

I know that no device is without problems, however it seems that WD still has a long way to go even on the most basiscs of features. Asustor is quite good, but it’s still not there yet on the matter of DLNA and streaming for homeuse, however they have some awesome features. Some of them i even suggested here like the possibility to change the light intensity, I also gave as an example their scheduler.

@Vertech1: if i decide to sell the EX2, i also want to keep the HDDs and only the case has no real value…around 130euros against the 300euros for a synology.

Anyway, i really hope WD comes up with something good for us fast and don’t just expect to buy the new EX2100 just to run into the same problems.

7

I did recognize a lot of your problems with my wdmcex2. 

Especially with backups. 

Many other problems to. 

And one day I got an error  message  from the system that my fan was not working, and probably broken. 

My fan had never worked,  but now I got a official confirmation,  and after thar more would follow. 

At first I found this still  more annoying than it already was,  but then WD decided that I had suffered enough,  and offered a refund for the box. 

I was so happy because I had already decided to buy an other Nas. 

With the refund I was able to buy a Synology DS414,  and I put the Red drives in this one. (just jbod) 

From that moment i found out that the learning curve of this Nas would be a little steeper. 

It’s almost learning a new OS. 

But after some time I found out that everything really WORKED! 

The software is not very intuitive and easy,  and you will make mistakes. 

I formatted per accident one hdd,  but had made a backup before. 

The wdmcex2 is more easy to use,  but the annoyance is too big. 

I’am sorry for WD,  but I prefer to pay the higher Synology price over the cheaper WD, for more joy and relaxation. 

It feels so good when a backup is made without any hassle,  or errors. 

Everything works as it should,  and I can spend time learning more about the software,  without recover from constant errors. 

I really can’t understand why WD isn’t willing to sell the best products on the market. 

I’am sure the knowledge is there,  so why don’t they? 

I thank WD they gave me the opportunity to switch to another brand. 

I’am very happy with my new Nas,  I’am sorry WD! 

**********

8

My biggest problem with EX2 is the fact that is unreliable when you are outside of your network. WD MyCloud desktop doesn’t work. The smartphone APP works sometimes, but eventualy it will say that you don’t have access or permissions. Then you have to add the device again or generate another code. Not easy if you are over internet.

But since I switched to VPN, i can ignore most of this problems. VPN is the answer here if you want to stop loosing hours of your time trying to make ex2 work as advertised

9

adicrst wrote:

My biggest problem with EX2 is the fact that is unreliable when you are outside of your network. WD MyCloud desktop doesn’t work. The smartphone APP works sometimes, but eventualy it will say that you don’t have access or permissions…

Hi, new user here. Is the problem with it sometimes not working because you have sleep enabled?

If not sleep related, then why hasnt this problem been fixed? I still have time to return mine and im concerned for the future that you guys seemed to have already faced. Thanks.

PS. I turned on my app when the EX2 was asleep. I did notice the app took longer to load (spining circle icon). But then the EX2 turned on and I was able to access it. When yours doesnt load, is it that the circle icon spins forever or what error?

10

With error 451 most of the time. And i’m sure that the device was not sleeping since back home someone was streaming a movie to the tv. I also checked after the streaming ended and the same problem.
like i said in another post, my work around to all the ex2’s bu@@@@t is VPN.
I really like ex2 but i’m sorry to say this, turn it back and spend the extra money on a synology. Light years ahead of WD. Don’t go buying ex2100 to run into the same problems and next year around this time you will shout for updates and no WD answer.
WD lost all my faith and credibility. I feel cheated that for a new product they offered half a year support and the other half spent it on making a new product and we were abandoned.

I bought one ex2 on February and another in March and you are still running into the same problems now at the starting of June. Does this seem fair to you as a customer that spent good money ?

1 Like
11

Hey guys,> I want to come with an update to my topic and post the difference between EX2 expert series and DL2100 business series. With red is the DL2100 review compared with EX2.

So what i like about EX2:

  • fast read/write ( this is only because i don’t have another NAS to compare)

   - quite fast read/write, about 15-20 MB more than EX2 ( not using link aggregation)

  • small and elegant design

   - bigger and chunkier. I like EX2’s design more, but this is the trend now on NAS devices, so it’s ok

  • quiet

   - except the first seconds when the device is booting, the fan is quite.

  • apearently easy to use

   - apearently easy to use

  • intuitive explanations in the GUI

   - intuitive explanations in the GUI is keept and i like this

  • cheaper than other competitor ( now i know why :expressionless: )

   - not very cheap at 650+ euros. I guess they charge the extra money for hardware( better CPU, more RAM and upgradeable, dual network and dual power supply. Not a very improved OS to justify the cost)

  • quality HDDs
       - quality HDDs

   - added power button. This small and common thing is needed.

   - public folders can finally be turned off and deleted. Seems that they finally understand and implemented one of customers biggest request.

   - finally the fan is working and the fan’s rotations are counted

   - RAM is upgradable

So what i don’t like about EX2:

  • no power button. Even if WOL is available and something so simple as a power button may seem unnecessary, trust me it’s needed.
  • public folders can’t be made private ( on ex2100 it can, but firmware update for EX2 is 6 months old)
  • power scheduler is not customizable enough

   - power scheduler is still the same and very primitive.

  • smartphone apps are not reliable, maybe because of the ex2 's firmware. Sometimes it connects and the next time it sais that you don’t have access or permissions and you have to add the device again. Not reliable when you are away.

   - smartphone app seems to be more stable on DL2100. Still not perfect, but until now i had only 2 problems when the app could not connect to NAS. Again, the fix was to generate another access code, delete the device and add it again. Still needs work!

  • support is very limited

  - I still found problems in the first 1hour of usage, and nothing to be done without a firmware update.

  • firmware is not customizable enough ( have you see Synology or Asustor ? …if not, take a good look you have enough to lean WD !! )

  - same thing as EX2, beside some extra features like public folder deletion, 2xNICs connectivity options, everything is the same as EX2

  • updates for EX2 stopped and no one from WD want to make an official statement about what’s going on.

  - DL2100 is not better at this chapter. Still no updates since the device release ( 1.06.133 realeased a few days ago is only for a security update, not performace and usability improvement )

  • backup works whenever it wants

  - no problems so far, but i only use remote backup and most of the backup problems were related to attached stick/drive

  • unable to backup on a shared location except on another WD device

   - same problem/ ‘feature’

  • app market from ages ago with no active updating

   - same app market

  • for every new shared folder created, you have to create a separate backup job, because editing existing ones is impossible

    - problem persists. No possibility to edit a job once it’s created

  • no possibility to turn OFF .wdmc hidden folders where not needed. If you have to copy all the picture folders on another location, you will end up copying those hidden .wdmc folders aswell. If you have a few hundrets of picture folders, good luck clean that up.

    - so far, i couldn’t see any .wdmc hidden folders. I’m sure they are somewhere, but even with show hidden folders  option activated on Windows, i couldn’t se them. Copy of the folder on another WIN machine doesn’t seem to have other files beside what I added to that folder. I haven’t tried SSH

  • When accessing EX2’s dashboard over internet or VPN, My cloud Services shows as turned OFF and can’t be turned on, but when i access the dashboard within the internal network, Cloud Services shows as ON. Also you can’t use tools that require Cloud Services to be turned ON, ex statistics of disk usage.

    - same problem.

  • Dashboard can’t be accessed over VPN or any other subnet. The only workaround is to turn Cloud Access ON, even if you do not do the port forwarding on the router to actually have Cloud Access over the internet

   - same problem

  • FTP still has problems

   - I couldn’t make FTP work the way i wanted, only wih the same setting from EX2, which i’ve talked about on this forum.

  • If you have a normal backup job and you create a Sync backup job, it will not sync the existing backup, but it will create another folder and double your files on the backup target nas. Not to mantion that day 28 is the beste WD could do. What if i want to do a sync on day 30 or 31.

   - same problem

  • WOL is not a feature if the target is shutdown while attempting to run a backup job

   - same problem

  • no possibility to hide folders from users that do not have access

   - same problem

  • no idea is the fan is actually working or when it should be activated. Fan RPM is always 0

   - TURN OFF LED option is not available anymore. I was using that and i don’t like the bright light during the night.

   - No possibility to see how much space is free/used on every disk when JBOD. Only if you map the shares or calculate how much every share is using. Not practical !

   - Problems with the email notification system. A shutdown/reboot (which is critical to know) of the device is considered an information instead of atleast a warning if not critical. Therefore, notification email not sent. Also a successfull backup is considered a warning, instead of an information. I have’t tested all the event’s but since these are quite important i notified WD support.