Performance so far

I have to say, after 2 years of ownership, I’m somewhat underwhelmed with the capabilities of this product. Issues so far:

Its slow. I guess that’s to be expected for the price point but having a gigabit network attached to this thing is way overkill. .

Heat, heat, heat. WD’s fan strategy is laughable and its hard not to think its there to sell more hard drives after death by prolonged heat exposure. My fan has NEVER come on even though the drives get too hot to touch. I can’t transfer files for longer than 30 minutes before Windows throws “an unexpected error has occurred”. The error will persist until the drives cool down. I have since laid the unit on its side and placed a PC fan next to it to blow air through the vents. This helped dramatically but an unexpected requirement.

Offering Plex on this unit. I didn’t buy the EX2 to be my Plex server, but I figured I give it a try. All I can say is don’t bother.

Drive access virtually non stop. No idea what its doing. I’m looking at it now and the drives are churning away. I’m certainly not accessing it and neither is anyone else. Even accessing its web based status page takes over a minute while the processor waits for some time between drive read/writes. My Plex server accesses the EX2 since that’s where I store my media. Plex is configured to update media changes automatically. Perhaps the EX2 can’t handle that either?

So, unless anyone has some advice, I’m going to chalk this up to a product that didn’t live up to expectations.

Hi, as you mentioned the drive does have a gigabit NIC, however is your complete network setup gigabit? Is you are accessing the drive over wifi, do you have a AC Router and you computer is capable of AC connectivity?

In regards of the drive heating up, what temperature does your drives reach? According to this post by a WD Staff member his drives had to reach 57 degrees celsius before having the fan turned up, although this was I believe in an older version of the firmware.

In regards of the drive not going into sleep mode, you may shutdown all the services that you may not use, like remote access.

FYI, the EX2 is one of the earlier and less expensive NAS units. I have one of the newest WD NAS boxes called the DL2100. Fan works great’ unit stays cool, It runs PLEX fine (the $25 added optional 4GB RAM helps apps like PLEX a lot), file transfers work great and meet spec of 115MB/sec under ideal conditions (wired gigabit connections and USB3 devices on PCs all the way along the data path). I get 114 MB/sec, tops.

It sounds like you have outgrown the EX2, so consider getting any of the newer EX or DL devices in link below. Units are also sold without drives, perhaps you can still use the drives in your EX2.

Link to Business Series (meaning faster and better and more $ than Expert Series) You can switch between Series to compare here:

Lluna & Mike

I appreciate the feedback.

Additional background on my system - all of my PC’s have gigabit NIC’s, router is an ASUS AC68R. While some PC’s and TV’s are accessing media with wifi, the problem I characterized above is on a wired connection. I was lucky to have my house wired with CAT 6 in every room when it was built.

The only way I can determine the temperature of the drives is by looking at the WD software (which I don’t trust) or by physically touching the drives. Since I now have a fan blowing across the case, the temperature discussion is academic, I’m convinced the drives will last much longer this way.

Since I wrote my first post, I’ve shut off the cloud access - wow, what a difference! I now get better performance with much less drive access. Unfortunately, this is one of the features I wanted when I purchased the EX2 so now I have to settle for less than I expected. I appreciate the review of the DL2100, it sound like a significant upgrade. However, it doesn’t help those of us who had expectations of a product living up to its hype. I don’t feel I’ve out grown the EX2, I’m still waiting for it to do what I purchased it for.

May be you should try WD EX2 Ultra, the new one. From what I skimmed, it has as same CPU and RAM as WD EX2100 (I think CPU is twice the speed (Dual core of almost the same model) and RAM is twice the size of the older version) which not many people report about performance problem. But the fan can be the same or improved. WD EX2 Ultra diskless version costs only around US$160 while WD EX2100 costs $200-$250 and DL2100 costs $300.

I have my cloud access ON and not causing problems. I am beginning to think the EX2 was a WD NAS “experiment” that was not fully designed and subsequently developed like the newer ones have been; e.g. the current NAS devices.

Sorry Guys,
but the answer to Bob issues and reported by most of the people on forum (performance, security, fan, leds, upgrades, and many more) cannot be “buy another and more expensive WD NAS”.
I can agree that EX2 was/is an “entry level” NAS, but some of the issues here are more related to poor WD support and firmware upgrades that went in another direction instead of customers requests.
By the way, some of the issues reported on forum were totally ignored by WD.

So, at the end, I agree with you :wink: : I will change my NAS sooner or later, but, for sure, NOT with another WD.

Agree companies need to get it right the first time, because they may never get a second chance. Apple got it right with three products, the iPoo, iPhone and iPad, and they continue to be big sellers. Although I can remember when Apple was not getting it right and almost bankrupt and their stock was selling for around $8/share way back when. 'Anyway, WD apparently did get it right with the new NAS EX/DL series and that is all I want to report.

My Cloud no longer goes to sleep after installing Plex app
http://support.wdc.com/KnowledgeBase/answer.aspx?ID=13848

I dont know if this might help…
Please have a look here, just helped for my mycloud

http://shortattentionspade.com/how-to-make-your-wd-mycloud-■■■■-less-or-for-seo-purposes-improving-the-performance-of-your-wd-mycloud/#comments

and yes the 4 funny dots are supposed to spell s…u…c…//// k (sorry)

As he says login with SSH

and run these commands

(you can check it with the atop command)

I appreciate all the constructive advice. I truly want this thing to work but it seems like it may not be in the cards. At this point I shut down everything that I bought the EX2 for including cloud access. Adding any of these features causes the processer to bog down and high disk activity. The only thing I use for now is to store the movies for my Plex server which resides on laptop dedicated to Plex and iTunes. Last night, it even failed at that as I started receiving network errors from Plex which dropped out the movie in. I took a look at the EX2 and the Drive 1 LED was solid red. The EX2 was totally unresponsive so I had to remove power to reboot.

As I see it, this purchase was a complete failure and no amount of tech support from WD will help a product I consider not ready for prime time. I’m going to replace it with a cheap desktop that I can load up with drives to perform the same functions. Not happy about wasting the money on the EX2 and losing the small form factor but I don’t see much of a choice anymore.

Just get another NAS, even if not a WD brand or model.

I know this is an old thread but I thought I would provide an update. It seems I was so fixated on fixing the problem that I never researched my warranty options. I was pleased to learn that my EX2 was still within warranty and I could return it, not for a new one but a factory rebuilt unit. At this point I had nothing to lose so I started the process.

The end result is the replacement works. No network errors, no hard drive errors, just plain works. Yes, the fan still reacts the same way, meaning non responsive unless I’m sitting on the surface of the sun. I’m good with leaving a USB on top to keep things cool.

Moral of the story is-send it back if your having problems. I was seriously doubting my abilities and my infrastructure trying to get the old one to work. Yeah, I’d like to know what was wrong with the old one but I won’t lose any sleep over it.

Thank you WDC for having a return program. Certainly worked for me.