Review: WD 4TB MyCloud Home NAS
Western Digital’s MyCloud Home NAS product is an attempt to marry up traditional NAS functionality with a web-aware OS that exposes your files so they can be accessed from across the internet. Unfortunately, for my purposes, it doesn’t succeed all that well. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Installation went smoothly. I hooked the NAS up to my switch and plugged it in. It got an address, and off and running I went. I logged on to their website (mycloud.com) and there it was. No files on it yet, but I would fix that soon. I installed the local access software on my Windows 7 machine with no problems.
I bought the NAS for two purposes. I wanted to use it as a media server and also as ‘yet another backup destination’. It turned out to serve the former purpose fairly well, but not the latter.
I back up about 350 GB of data every couple weeks. It’s a hassle, but you know the rule: if you want to keep it, back it up. And I have a lot of stuff. My data is stored on my old NAS, a Seagate 2TB unit that has served me well. I back it up first to one virtual server, then another. In other words, even my backups are backed up.
I make two types of backups. I back up the files themselves disk-to-disk to the first virtual server. Then I use Comodo Backup to make a .cbu file of those files on a different virtual drive. Then I back up the .cbu file to a second virtual server, on a different host. I had hoped to establish the new NAS as another backup destination for the file-based backups, but it didn’t work out too well.
One of the first things I noticed about the NAS was that the OS was apparently pretty big. The NAS only has 3.5 actual terabytes of space on it, as opposed to 3.6 plus on a normal 4TB drive. The difference is likely the OS size. That seems pretty large to me, considering the functionality involved. One of the next things I noticed was that it was apparently pretty slow.
My normal file-based, disk-to-disk backups to the first virtual server take four to five hours. I was not prepared for backups to the new NAS to take twelve to fourteen, but they did. The difference is apparently a much higher per-file overheead than in a conventional hard dirve or NAS arrangement. The 350 GB that I back up consists of almost 100,000 files, and there are plenty of small ones.
I tested the NAS with large files and found the disk write speed to be acceptable, but not thrilling. But with small files the thing goes haywire, with excessive overhead requiring long copy times.
I also got a very strange error from the NAS. I was using some software to copy files to the NAS and I actually got an error message telling me that it couldn’t create a file larger than 4GB because the file system was FAT32. I know it isn’t really FAT32, because the operating system can copy larger files to the NAS, but the software I was using (BeyondCompare) couldn’t. That would be impossible if the filesystem really was FAT32.
Another problem I had with the NAS’s speed was the speed at which it recovered disk space, which was agonizingly slow (assuming you delete a lot of smaller files at once, rather than one big file). It would literally take hours before the unit would report the expected amount of free space. I did not consider this a feature.
I will say that the trick feature that exposes your files on the internet does work well. But, I was looking for NAS functionality, not tricky stuff.
A normal NAS functions by creating a Windows share or shares and allowing files to be copied to it/them. The advantage of this approach is it works for all versions of all operating systems that I’m aware of. Any version of Windows (since Windows 2000, anyhow) or the Mac (since OS/X) or Linux / Unix can map a drive or mount point to the share. The MyCloud NAS does not function this way. Instead it uses drivers to simulate the existence of a share. This means that only computers that are compatible with the driver install can see the NAS (except over the web). In my environment, that’s 2 computers out of about 20, both real and virtual. Only my Win7 boxes can see the NAS. Not my 2008 Server, nor my 2003 servers, nor my XP VM. I found that pretty disappointing.
Then, to make matters worse, the darn thing died on me after about six months. I honestly do not know if I’ll go to the hassle of getting it replaced. I certainly won’t be buying another.
Still, if you only run Windows 7 and later, and don’t run any servers, and don’t expect to use it as a backup destination, it might somehow be worth the money.