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Storage you can see, clouds you create

WD My Cloud EX4

With the introduction of the My Cloud series, Western Digital has come a long way since the old My Book Live, which was a passable but limited NAS in comparison to the competition. Unlike its predecessors, the EX4 has clearly been designed for NAS use from the ground up and is the only unit on this list to completely do away with disk caddies, something I feel all NAS makers should do – no matter if they are screwless they’re still frustrating!

Other novel features on the EX4 include two DC inputs to permit the use of redundant power supplies (although only one is included) and the ability to perform the initial setup procedure from a mobile device.

WD has really targeted the small biz or enthusiast user who wants to build their own personal cloud for use with a variety of smart devices. The whole system can be managed from your favourite iDroid device, but granting new devices access to the personal cloud content requires an activation code to be generated on one that is already paired.

Home screen is a dark and den like affair

WD’s App Centre isn’t positioned as prominently within the user experience as others, perhaps because it currently features only eleven apps in addition to the four HTTP/FTP/P2P clients that come preloaded. While it may not be so populous yet, there’s plenty to get you started and more is sure to come.

Behind this new design language is a 2.0 GHz CPU of unknown origin and just 512MB of DDR3, so outright performance is comparable to the DS414j, though each have their strengths – with the WD box being somewhat quicker when writing, but losing out somewhat in read speed.

Only eleven apps in the roster so far

Benchmarks for the EX4 were performed using two versions of WD's firmware as they had apparently hoped to address some performance issues, but I'll let the numbers do the talking on that front. The firmware that came with the unit managed healthy sequential and random writes of 63MB/s each and clocked sequential and random reads at 49MB/s and 26MB/s respectively.

Updating the firmware to v1.04.05 had little effect on the random read, boosted sequential reads by 6MB/s and dropped the write performance from 63MB/s to just 32MB/s. Maybe WD needs to take this one back to the drawing board again – roll on v1.04.06. Still, the EX4 is a welcome upgrade over WD’s previous NAS attempts, but perhaps in this sector some extra RAM would have been a better spec boost than redundant power supplies? ®

Price £320 (unpopulated)
More info Western Digital

CrystalDiskMark test results

CrystalDiskMark Sequential Read/Write results

CrystalDiskMark 4k Read/Write results