I am looking for ideas, personal experience, and advice on what other users are planning to do once they hit the 16TB limit. Without taking into account the recent issue WD had with its servers what are users doing with respect to the future of your “Personal Cloud”. Are you staying with WD, or looking elsewhere? I know for me personally I would say that with the current rate of data being put on my EX4 16TB unit I expect to hit the cap within the next 2-3 years (quicker if my 15 users take advantage of their free space I gave them in their share, but its unlikely they will). While 2-3 years leaves a lot of room for new breakthroughs by both WD and other companies along with changes in the firmware I was just looking for ideas since as of today if I were to invest in additional large scale(3TB+) USB devices to expand via the 2 ports on the device those share are public and thats a huge no no since my users cant have write access except for this own share folder.
Also, what is the rough time frame to move to a new device with respect to drive failures. I know with a laptop its every few years. How often do you move to new NAS devices?
Hi sxc7885, by the time you decide to upgrade there will be 6TB or larger single drives. You can make any suggestion in the ideas boards, like adding more options for USB connected hard drives on the EX4. These will be taken into account for future firmware updates.
I would easily add a unit via USB but since the firmware on the EX4 is so flawed its left public and means it can be read/write by all the users which is useless
The only problem is that since the firmware is so flawed adding USB drives (Which would be a great solution to this problem and is discussed in other forum post) leaves them open as public shares. With that said its the worst method when trying to ensure users don’t delete files on the share.
As a response to the future firmware sentence all I can say is that WD needs to hurry up and fix the issues having to wait this long for the 100% CPU usage and 500 -internal error and the other COUNTLESS problems that this system has is ridiculous.
