First what exactly is the point of this product? Its essentially an EX2 with forced raid one storage to mirror up the single drive to a second. There’s no need to create an entire new product line for this.
FINALLY, instead of releasing new products under the MyCloud lineup why doest WD address the ever mounting set of firmware issues already plaguing the lineup. Taking a quick view at any of the mycloud product forms and you will see the ever growing set of problem post by faithful users who are now abandoning ship after the connection issues.
Frankly this post might sound harsh but its the honest non-biased truth, and WD just doesn’t get it!
I believe this replaces their My Book Live Duo product. This is obviously aimed at entry-level consumer market and is not a prosumer product like EX2. But since the CPU speed is same as the EX2’s (and I suspect same 512 MB of RAM as EX2’s), your comment has some truth in it. This seems like an EX2, except with some features like apps, etc. disabled in the firmware and RAID 1 enabled by default (which sounds like it CAN be changed to JBOD or RAID 0) - to keep basic consumers thinking this is a lower-tier product than the “premium” EX2 product. Basically just a different marketing spiel for a different target market - aka in marketing world as market segmentation aka old wine in new bottle 
My guess is this will have slightly lower pricing than the EX2 at same storage capacities…or maybe same pricing - who knows…since it’s not been announced yet.
Prices are currently near exact as to the EX2. ive listed the price for both unites below
EX2
0 $199.99
4 $369.99
6 $469.99
8 $569.99
Mirror
4 $349.99
6 $449.99
8 $549.99
sxc7885 wrote:
First what exactly is the point of this product? Its essentially an EX2 with forced raid one storage to mirror up the single drive to a second.
Where do you see that? According to the specs, it supports RAID0, RAID1, JBOD and SPANNING. No “Forced RAID1…”
Gotta think twice about what you see online, though… Amazon reports that it includes “Integrated Thunderbolt Cable.” Nope…
Also says “No AC adapter required.” Nope…
sxc7885 wrote:
FINALLY, instead of releasing new products under the MyCloud lineup why doest WD address the ever mounting set of firmware issues already plaguing the lineup.
Well, keeping it “honest,” do you really think that they’re NOT working on addressing the issues? Just because they haven’t released specific fixes yet doesn’t mean they’re not working on them, does it?
TonyPh12345, the drive is meant to provide safely for users data and mirrors it so essentially it is just an EX2 with a debatable if useful added feature or two set in raid 1(sorry I had my raid modes mixed up and noted 0 instead of 1).
As for the second thought I want to think they ae actually working on fixes but dont expect much from them since after months of problems with the device how can I honestly rely on WD any more as they keep releasing new products plagued with the same problems we are currently experiencing. While I was not a EX4 user from day one I have owned it for a few months now and have not seen any bug fixed but the launch of 2 new cloud devices.
When my EX4 works its a great product however when it has a problem like the 500 internal error or any of the other issues its a huge pain. What bothers me is that problems like this are indeed major ones and I would think WD would not wait 4 months to fix it(when the first 500 internal error post was seen on the EX4 forum) or the CPU spike issue which was first reported back in Nov of 2013.
I agree with TonyPh12345 on the point that I believe WD is working on fixing the issues - that I don’t doubt. But as an EX2 customer which has only been out for a month, I do feel their QA team/QA process could use improvements before they release brand new products to market only to have customers find flaws in them. And I am not talking of performance issues either in data transfers or CPU constantly staying above 95% because it’s indexing massive amounts of media for DLNA streaming. No, I am talking about real bugs that could have and should have been caught in the QA stage.
I am at least happy that WD, in my specific case, has acknowledged what I pointed out was a bug 3 weeks ago…just a week after the product was released. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere - EX2 out of the box cannot actually do FTP because there is a critical bug in the ftp configuration - and without that fix, a customer won’t be able to get ftp running on EX2 (unless they go into the shell and make some tweaks to a config file that I discovered - but that’s simply not reasonable for most customers). But I am happy that WD couple days ago accepted in an email that they were able to replicate the issue and promised a fix in the next firmware release. But something like this should have been caught in the QA process - it’s a simple case of testing by setting an external IP in the config screen in the dashboard for a major functionality…how can something like that have been overlooked?
I suspect since EX2 and EX4 share the same codebase, that FTP is also broken on the EX4 - and one cannot save the external IP via the config screen when configuring the FTP…it probably stays unchanged at 0.0.0.0, like on EX2.
I know that I can not get the FTP access to work on my EX4 and that is after I have spent several hours on the phone with various support agents. As you pretty much summed up I would agree that WD should have dealt with the major issues instead of releasing new products with problems
Just a quick question…do you have Verizon FiOS as your ISP for the network where you have the EX4 and wasn’t able to get FTP to work?
No I have twc. I have the ex4 plugged into a time capsule that plugs directly into the modem since it only has 1 port
Ok…I wanted to check because FiOS, my ISP, blocks standard ftp port 21. Assuming TWC does not, there is no reason FTP shouldn’t work…unless it suffers from the same bug in the FTP config screens as in EX2.
Did you forward your port from the router (Time Capsule) to the EX4’s IP? If not, see this → https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3415.
If you’ve set that up, then you also need to make sure you have forwarded your port from the TWC router/modem to the Time Capsule. You’d probably need to go to the LAN IP of your TWC router from a browser to set it up (google for it if you haven’t done that). Basically you need to make sure traffic coming on port 21 from outside goes straight to your EX4.
Only AFTER you have done these two steps will you be able to set up FTP on EX4. I can guide you further if you need, but I’d need confirmation that the routers have port forwarding setup properly. And in case the bug affecting EX2 does indeed affect EX4, I can tell you the workaround to get ftp to work.
Cybernut1 wrote:
Ok…I wanted to check because FiOS … blocks standard ftp port 21
What FiOS POP are you in? I’m in the Keller, TX POP (covers the entire Dallas/Fort Worth territory) – FTP isn’t blocked here… I use it all the time.
Interesting. I’m in Philadelphia FiOS area. And for me port 21 has always been blocked. I can use any port but 21 for ftp. So I use port 44.
Hey, welcome back, LinAdmin!! Going for a new record of four bans in one day?
While I am unsure what exactly causes LInAdmin to get banned from the forum what he has said in the post above is essentially the truth. WD has some major issues in their products which is the main point of this post and they fail to fix them as quick as possible. Then you combine that unhappiness with the recent server outage and it becomes furious customers. I use the EX4 for business and I can not tell you how much trouble it can be BUT when it works it a great system and I am happy I bought it(WHEN IT WORKS).
However, the other downside of the lack of fixes are the inclusion of new features. Most companies always include one or two new abilities in their system build updates. After viewing synology, qnap and seagate who have all pushed out steady updates to not only fix problems but also add new features and refine them WD has released 2 builds for the ex4 and both times they create more problems than fixes.
It just upsets me to see the previous statement happening with WD and they continue to release new product’s using the same code which for the most part means the same problems. I stopped recommending WD to anyone since their nas units are not market ready and told them to go elsewhere. I just cant see scrapping a thousand dollar device and starting over, but when it comes time to seek a replacement unless WD has entirely rewritten the MyCloud experience I will be going elsewhere.
Again, this post isnt meant to be overly harsh to WD or the EX4 units. Its meant to be an honest non-biased post from someone who uses the NAS system to the fullest possible extent it was created for.
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BTW sxc7885, I was poking through some more code and config files for EX2 last night and I realized you are dead on. They have in many config files code for both the EX2 and the then-unannounced Mirror and disable certain things in the Mirror. So now I agree with you that they are probably identical hardware-wise but the Mirror is intentionally left a bit crippled in the software. Until someone buys one, I won’t be able to know if that is the case for certain…it could also be that they use same family of CPUs but not the exact same CPU, in which case a lot of the code would run on both CPUs but with differing degrees of performance.
yeah the unites are almost identical. While I was comparing the EX2 with the mirror based on the information WD listed between the two prodcut websites. The information you listed only goes to support it a bit more.
I just dont understand the units are plagued with problems, lacking features basic on the competitors, and yet WD still introduces the product
I agree…but it is also apparent to me they had planned this product roadmap long before these issues cropped up (some of which should have been fixed dring QA) and so they are sticking to that roadmap.
BTW, if you still need help, I can try to get your EX4’s ftp to work. I already posted a some port forwarding instructions earlier - you may have seen them or may have not - but if you like I can probably help with getting it to work…though today I may be in and out of the forum so I may not respond for a few hours.
Ive lost all hope as well. I am one click away from buy it now on amazon from ordering a Snology. I am just hoping that we would hear something soon so I dont have to waste more money to get a product that does was its suppose to do out of the box
