I’d like to express my disappointment in WD marketing/advertising of the 4TB WD My Cloud Mirror external storage device. On the WD product spec page WD does not specify the size of the drives that come with the unit. WD tells us the capacity of the unit but not the size of each drive, the speed of the drive, if the capacity you are quoting is with RAID 1 or RAID 0.
I bought the 4TB My Cloud Mirror. My expectation was that I bought 2 qty 4TB drives that mirror each other within the unit. If one drives dies the other has a mirror back up of it. I received 4TB My Cloud Mirror in the mail and opened to find out that I have 2 qty 2TB drives set up for RAID 1. So I have a 2TB Cloud Mirror, not a 4TB Cloud Mirror as marketed by WD.
WD please specify in the product specs exactly what the unit drives are, are they 5400 rpm or 7200? Please do not make it vague by telling us capacity and not specifying the type of capacity.
I will be sure to tell everyone with the frustration I experienced trying to understand what I was purchasing from WD. I uasually build my own storage but I wanted to get something easy for back up only. I feel duped by WD and I would never buy another WD all in one unit again.
Most RAID-enabled WD devices are factory-shipped using RAID 0 (Stripe) for maximum out-of-the-box storage space as all WD RAID-enabled units allow for at least 2 different RAID levels at the very minimum. A RAID 1 array with full 4TB of usable space means the actual unit is 8TB as per RAID level design (This is true for all RAID-enabled devices regardless of manufacturer). While I understand the confusion, the WD My Cloud Mirror is named the same way as the original WD My Book Mirror with the purpose of highlighting the mirror-RAID capabilities vs. the regular WD My Cloud.
On the other hand and with regards to internal hard drive specs, at this moment WD only provides capacity information because all other parameters and behavior are controlled by the enclosure, and as such the internal drives do not behave the same way as when used directly.
[[EDIT]]: To make it clear, other WD RAID devices with 3 drives may ship as RAID 5, and the WD My Cloud Mirror ships as RAID 1. Nonetheless, the capacity listing is for RAID 0 (Stripe) or Span mode.
Except for the My Cloud Mirror drives. They come in mirrored RAID 1 format. Also, the My Cloud EX4 drives ship as a RAID 5 drives.
[edit]
On the My Cloud Mirror drive, the 4TB refers to total potential capacity, not mirrored capacity. You will lose half the reported capacity duplicating your data.
