Terrible Product

My worst decision this month was the purchase of WD 2td storage.  There is NOTHING wrong with my old IOMEGA 1td external storage; just plug & go and it auto backed up just fine.  I bought a 2nd computer and wanted both to access the external drive.  I thought WD would solve the problem.  I have spent so many hours, downloading everything they offered…what a waste of time, effort and $$$.  This thing is slow.  It’s expensive.  Is NOT user Friendly, particulary for a 67 year old person.  Customer Support…**bleep** no it almost nonexistent.  I’m sorry I purchased this thing.  Peter

Hi Peter,

This thing is faster than a USB 2.0 or 3.0 local disk in the right networking conditions. It is also pretty affordable when you compare street price of this product with the naked WD Red Disk that is inside.

Now, a NAS is not a simple consumer product, and this product has definitely some quirks.

Question is, do you want some help?

Please take a look here  http://community.wd.com/t5/WD-My-Cloud/WD-My-Cloud-urgent-firmware-issue/m-p/733258#M14392

As mentioned earlier with the right networking parts connecting to it the My Cloud works well and is fairly fast.  Please provide some details of your equipment and issues and we might be able to help.

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I think this device is for brave Unix users, with decent IT administrator skills. If you enable the root password and ssh into it, you have a fairly well-equipped Debian. You can backup via rsync, transfer via sftp, mount shares via NFS, SMB or WebDAV support is nice too.

The rest, honestly, is rather **bleep** stuff, which makes the device not suitable for the average user. For instance, they provide with a web interface to access files and shares from anywhere on Internet, however this is nothing but a Java/Applet based little program, which starts SMB (i.e., Windows) mounting of such shares, using the client OS facilities. Considering that nowadays most OSes disable Java access from browsers, this approach makes things very impractical for the unexpert user, or when you use a friend’s PCs or PCs on hotels and Internet cafes. And often I cannot mount those shares anyways, due to several tricks, such as firewall settings on the client side.

I’ve installed a PHP file manager instead, which I access via the device pre-installed Apache web-server, but this is nothing like the Google Drive or Dropbox web interfaces, which is what WD should really provide. And, of course, setting up PHP applications is nothing within the reach of the average user.

To summarise, it’s true that it isn’t user friendly, unless you are an IT expert. As for the performance, I’ve been pretty satisified so far.