Western Digital My Cloud EX4 8TB review

The Western Digital My Cloud EX4 8TB NAS comes loaded with four 2TB Western Digital Red hard disks formatted in a 6TB RAID5 array, so you don’t have to worry about installing your own hard drives. Even better, it’s already configured with a few useful network shares.

The EX4 8TB’s web interface is one of the best looking web interfaces we’ve seen, with large, clearly labelled icons that make it easy find key features and keep an eye on the NAS’s status. You can quickly view the health of your data volumes and see if the EX4 8TB’s firmware needs to be updated.

The EX4 8TB is sturdy and well made. At the back are two Gigabit Ethernet ports, which can be configured so that one Ethernet port takes over if the other’s connection fails. Alternatively, they can be bonded to improve throughput. There’s also a connector for a redundant power supply, but only one power supply is provided; you’ll have to buy another if you wish to take advantage of this feature. There are also two USB3 ports.

We do have one major criticism of the EX4 8TB’s physical build quality, though. It’s too easy to eject one of the installed drives accidentally. Sadly, the EX4 8TB can’t recognise disks that have been inserted previously. Re-inserting the disk immediately triggered an eleven and a half hour rebuild of the RAID volume. Although the EX4 8TB remained functional throughout the restoration of the volume, your RAID5 volume will be lost if two drives are removed in this way. We’d certainly welcome locking drive bays in any future iteration of this model.

VOLUME CONFIGURATION

Setting up a new volume is a pleasingly simple process. You select the RAID type you want to use, say whether or not you want to use a hot spare and decide if you want to encrypt the volume. The EX4 8TB doesn’t support RAID6 but everything we expect to see is present. The EX4 8TB automatically creates three shared folders. One is a public SMB share and the other two are for Western Digital SmartWare and Apple Time Machine backups.

As is common with modern NAS devices, the EX4 8TB lets you install and run apps. Some apps are preinstalled, such as download clients that let you download large files via HTTP, FTP, or BitTorrent. There’s also a simple file manager that lets you browse files on the EX4 8TB, as well as a connected USB drive. A small range of third-party apps is available for download, including content management systems that you can use to serve a blog locally or online. Other helpful options include the ability to mount an ISO file and share it across your network. You can also set up an FTP server, administer the EX4 8TB remotely via WebDAV and back up data to a remote server or USB drive. Oddly, the NAS lacks a print server, a feature common to many NAS devices.

The EX4 8TB’s private cloud features are a major selling point, as it’s easy to get connected to the Western Digital My Cloud service. There are apps available for Windows, Android and iOS, and once they’re installed you can upload and download content to and from your NAS with ease. This is a particularly valuable feature if you have contractors, clients or staff that work off-site. If you’ve got a designer putting together some signage for you, for example, you can create a user account for them, choose the directories they can access and then email them a code so they can set up remote access. All that’s missing is a web access interface.

Unfortunately, although the My Cloud EX4 8TB makes it easy to share files and has an excellent interface, particularly for those who like to keep things simple, the EX4 4TB’s performance isn’t up to that of its rivals. In our standard SMB large file transfer test, the EX4 8TB produced a write speed of 45.9MB/s and a read of 49.7MB/s. In our much more challenging small file transfer test the Ex4 8TB produced a write speed of 6.2MB/s and a read speed of 13.6MB/s. In our iSCSI test, where a virtual drive is created on the NAS and mounted by a client PC as if it’s a local hard drive, the EX4 8TB produced an average large file transfer speed of 43.9MB/s and an average small file transfer speed of 31.5MB/s.

The EX4 8TB is pretty good value in terms of storage, as out works out to be just 7p per GB. The drives alone would cost a little over £300. The My Cloud EX4 8TB is cheap for a quad-bay NAS device, but if your business depends on fast data throughput we think an Atom-based NAS such as the Asustor AS-604T (https://www.expertreviews.com/uk/network-storage/1303258/asustor-as-604t) and a set of Western Digital Red disks would be a better buy. You’ll spend around £100 more but you’ll almost double your read and write speeds.