WD 40 TB My Cloud EX4100 Expert Series 4-Bay Network Attached Storage

This is a very good solid NAS drive. The case is metal with a gloss black plastic front. Drives are easy to install and the setup options are very well explained.I configured the NAS system to use RAID 1. Half the disk storage, but one drive is automatically copied to the other drive. Alternatively you can configure individual multiple volumes, one very large volume or a mixture of configurations. The system requires a minimum of one 3.5 hard drive.When first powered on the NAS system cooling fans are on full speed (quite noisy). This helps with clearing any accumulated dust from the drive bays. After about a minute the fan speed drops to a much slower speed which is whisper quiet (hard drive activity is louder than the fans).The blue LCD on the front panel contains very useful information about the system config and operation. Being able to see the IP address, system name, status, temperature and fan speed are very useful.The system has two Gigabit Ethernet posts and two 3.1 USB ports, so you have a choice of connections. The front 3.1 USB can be configured for automatic back-ups when another drive is plugged in.

A tidy little NAS drive but corners cut in a number of places (review of diskless version).Let’s start with fitting the HDDs. Annoying, The slots for the HDDs are spring loaded and there are no trays to guide in your expensive HDDs. Result? Slotting in 4 HDDs against the stiff springs and closing the clips resulted in a curious situation where only 2 of the HDD lights came on when I turned it on. What? Half of my ultra expensive brand new NAS drives are faulty? Nope. After much head scratching I found that if you “just” slide the HDDs in and close the door it is quite possible that the HDD is not aligned with the SATA receiver on the backplane. Frustrating but amazingly it did not mangle the drive or the backplane connector. Trick is to turn the NAS drive on it’s side and use the weight of the HDD to slide it in so gravity keeps it aligned with the backplane and all is well. The slots are much wider than the height of a “standard” drive so it is maddeningly easy to miss-align the HDDs.I bought a 2nd 4100 for an SSDx4 NAS. More problems. No HDD caddy means you stand no chance of fitting SSDs in there. Amazon came to the rescue with some perfect fit “ORICO 2.5 to 3.5 Inch Hard Drive Adapter” thingies. These turn your 2.5” drives into perfect-fit 3.5” drives. Best part of £40 lost there. Hmmm. All problems would have been solved if you could bolt the drives into a cradle and slide it in. But that may have added £2 to the build cost so I guess that’s why they don’t do it no more.Web interface is fine. A little slow but I guess it is a cheaper end NAS (or perhaps not – “Expert Series”?). Plugging a USB drive into the NAS gives you the option to share it via the NAS network share. Clever. More clever would be a file explorer within the interface pages so you could move the 7TB of data from the USB drive straight to a NAS folder. But you can’t (as far as I can tell). So you unplug the USB drive, plug it into your PC and leave the network to grind away with your PC running for 3 days (no joke) while it copies from USB to NAS via your PC. Hmm.File transfer speed seems fine (RAID 5) on a 1gig network.I give it 3.5 stars but I guess it will have to be 4 as I am feeling generous.In summary – nice, with reservations.

I plugged this into my home network and found it very easy to set up the options I needed including the media streaming facility. I added cloud access to the shares I wanted to and this works great for when I am not at home. The speed is limited by my broadband upload speed rather than anything else, but that is not the fault of this product. I have it on power saving mode, and this does mean that it can take quite a while to access the system the first time, with delays of up to about 30 seconds, but this is hardly an issue. Although it is stated as 16TB if you turn on RAID 1 so that the data is striped across the disks and a certain amount is used for error correction then the effective storage is reduced to around 10.8TB.It has run perfectly since I installed it about 2 months ago,, with one firmware update being performed flawlessly.