WD My Cloud EX4 review: Four-bay NAS wins on features, not speed
Western Digital’s My Cloud network-attached storage unit earned four stars when I reviewed it in October. I praised it for its performance and its user-friendly features. But 3TB is the maximum capacity that WD can deliver in that product, and since it’s a single-bay device it can’t provide the reassuring redundancy of RAID. The company’s announcement of the My Cloud EX4 today erases those limitations and adds a raft of other features. Speed isn’t one of them, however.
Because performance takes a backseat to features in this unit, I’ll cover that aspect of the My Cloud EX4 later. The EX4 offers all of the user-friendly features of the original My Cloud, packed in a metal four-bay enclosure that boasts a number of high-end perks the My Cloud does not. First and foremost among them is RAID support, specifically RAID 5 if you purchase the device prepopulated with drives. In addition to RAID 5, the EX4 supports RAID 0 (maximum performance, but no redundancy), RAID 1 (two disks mirrored), RAID 5+Hot Spare (same as RAID 5, but with a spare drive installed and ready to become operational in the event of a drive failure), and RAID 10 (nested RAID).
The WD My Cloud EX4 doesn’t rely on trays to mount its hard drives. They just slide into the bay. A locking mechanism, however, would be a welcome feature.
The unit we tested came from the factory with four 2TB drives in RAID 5, which means any one of the four drives could fail and you would still be able to recover all your data (2TB is reserved for parity, leaving 6TB of usable storage). Because the drives are hot-swappable, you can yank out the failed drive and replace it with a new one, and the EX4 will automatically rebuild the array without any downtime.
Good for business, very good for consumers
The balance of the EX4’s feature set will appeal to consumer and business users alike. Consumers will appreciate its friendly, dashboard-like user interface, its DLNA server and iTunes support, and its built-in torrent downloader. Business users will value its dual gigabit ethernet ports, with support for both link bonding (so you can pool the bandwidth of two broadband connections) and automatic failover (if one connection fails, the EX4 automatically switches to the other). Dual power connections deliver similar functionality: If one power supply fails, the EX4 can automatically switch to the other (though you must purchase the second one). Active directory support enables you to connect an EX4 to your company’s domain, and volume encryption means the box won’t boot without a password.
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