WD 4TB My Cloud EX2 Ultra NAS WDBVBZ0040JCH-NESN

Incredibly fast hardware – a very nice upgrade from my previous NAS.
I can obtain speeds very close to theoretical limit of 1000Mbps (gigabit speeds).
Testing was performed over approximate 35m Cat6; switching is GS-724T; router EdgeRouter Lite (gigabit network); normal sized packets

1000Mbps / 8 = 125MB/s (direct conversion of units)
but you need to take into consideration data overhead
and testing revealed 118MB/s read and 118MB/s write
which are amazing speeds

The first image was a 5TB Toshiba x300 drive (7200RPM); one drive
The second image was a 3TB WD Green drive (5400RPM); two drives (Spanning)

I decided to stay with the 3TB WD Green drives as I had two of them and I could populate both drives bays.
Why WD Green (WD’s Eco line) instead of WD Reds (designed for NAS)?
If WD thought it well enough to populate their lower end NAS/External hard drives devices with WD Greens then it is good enough for me (the two WD Greens I pulled from older WD NAS/External hard drives).

You can configure the drives as RAID 0, RAID 1, JBOD, Spanning.
Lots of options and a few apps but am using the device primarily just for storage (turned most of the apps).

Very stable – no compatibility issues.
Able to become your network’s Local Master Browser (excellent WD!)

To comment regarding one user’s review that he couldn’t use this as a hotswap enclosure – this and many other NAS DEVICES ARE NOT DESIGNED FOR HOTSWAPPING. The unit is a linux based unit with the HDD formatted with EXT4; don’t expect to remove a HDD and place it into your computer and hope to see the data unless you absolutely know what you are doing. If you don’t know what you are doing you have a very good chance of permanently destroying your data.

Data transfer WILL slow down significantly if you transfer lots of very tiny files – this is a known issue with many NAS devices and is not limited to WD.

Fast, reliable piece of hardware – very stable, and solid piece of engineering.

Really nice unit – seems well-made and well-designed. Drive installation was very easy; the top just pops open by pressing a tab, and drives slide in and are locked down with a metal plate on top that is secured with a thumbscrew. WD gives you these little tabs and special post screws that attach to the drives’ sides – the screws help guide the drive into place and you can easily pull the drives out with the provided tabs. Attractive unit that looks good on a shelf and goes well with other WD products. I like the vertical design WD external products have, as it better utilizes shelf space.

The firmware in the EX2 Ultra and the 3 TB My Cloud is different from the 2 TB version, and those devices are both are much more responsive than the smaller My Cloud device is. This device also comes out of hibernation/idle state much quicker than the 2 TB WD My Cloud. The EX2 Ultra has I believe a 1.3 GHz processor and 1 GB RAM, which is competitive with the better entry-level RAID NAS’s out there.

I installed two 3-TB HGST NAS drives in mine. They do seem to run hot, and when running a large backup to this device, drive temperatures regularly hit 52 and 53 degrees C with the fan running full tilt. I have never seen it get hotter than that, but that is significantly warmer than my QNAPS run (one has Seagate Ironwolfs, and one has WD Reds. I had the QNAP unit with the Reds before I got the EX2, if you’re wondering why I didn’t put the Reds in the EX2). May well be the HGST drives, which are 7200 RPM drives, just run hotter. Maybe at some point I’ll swap them out for WD Red drives and put them in another enclosure, as the Reds seem to run quite cool compared to their competitors.

I have read that most drives are rated to perform to 60 C, but I’d be more comfortable seeing operating temps in the 40’s. Right now, at idle and an hour after my last backup, the drives are at 50 and 51 C with the fan not running – in fact it doesn’t even turn on until it gets to 52 or so. All of the drive health indicators say “good”. I bought a small USB fan, and when I set it to blow air sideways over the top of the EX2, I can get temps to drop into the mid-40’s under operating load. The unit’s diagnostics always say everything is healthy and normal.

This is more of a consumer-geared device, and while pretty easy to use out of the box for a home user, is not nearly as configurable as the QNAP and Zyxel units, so that may be a negative if you with to set your device’s parameters.

This device is set up by default to be available for Time Machine backups, with no special configuration – so if you have a MAC and wish to have an external NAS RAID device, this unit is a great option, and very easy to use (mine is set up as RAID1, where the second drive mirrors the first).

Only “wish” is for WD to allow me to see hardware data (HDD, CPU temperatures, etc) remotely – I have not seen a way to view that info outside of my home network. The QNAP software does allow you to see hardware info remotely via the phone app. Other than that, the WD’s phone apps are well designed and easy to use, and allow seamless file access.

Easy to install and use. Price is a little on higher side but its good for home use

It arrived on Friday to my office and later on this same Friday I installed 2 hard drives laying around. EX2 told me one drive was faulty so I removed it and set up the machine as a JBOD. This was fast and a piece of cake! I have not been near it since then no need! Over the weekend from my house from several different computers I uploaded some movies and also I downloaded some movies too and utilized multiple uploads / downloads at once from several machines. The WD network is really neat as you have only to input “MyCloud” from any machine in the world. There were no failed downloads / uploads. Addtionally if I accessed my office machine main computer through MS Remote access I could reference the EX2 NAS and play any movie in real time. To be fair I could do real time movie playing across the net before installing the EX2. When I came back to the office on Monday I could play any of the freshly installed 11 movies in real time on the EX2 from any office computer but again I could do that when the movies were scattered across several machines.
Over all it was an impressive faultless performance and we have now put a lot more large files on it than just the test movies.
As you can see we can also back up from house to office and in fact the EX2 Ultra NAS could even be at a third location.

We had in the office a fanless older atom machine running an accounting program that needed a larger disk. However we used the iSCSI function of the EX2 to instead load onto the atom another pseudo drive. We used the iSCSI initiator function in windows. This added drive that steals space from the JBOD drive in the EX2 Hard drive is most useful if you need another dedicated small pseudo drive on a small low powered machine that the machine formats itself. I must add that the speed of the pseudo drive was not impressive! But still it did the trick!

The third use is the WD Sync. I do not fully understand this and why WD loads some files from the computers you elect to sync in an appearent arbritrary fashion without permission when you set up Sync and how do you remove some of these files from Sync. Why not WD not add any and leave adding to the user? WD needs to add one coheseive spelled out non intuitive manual on using and controlling SYNC. Having said that it is important if you are attempting to use this feature to set Windows to continual back up. Appearently if you delete a file in the Sync sphere it gets deleted from all particitpating machines. I do not see how to remove files from this situation. Nevertheless Sync appearently lets me reference files on any computer in the net from my computer WITHOUT going onto the computer holding that file. For example instead of referenceing an accounting spread sheet on say Daniel-PC for data I reference a copy on my machine in documents BUT WD is keeping the copy of my machine up to date with the master original on Daniel-PC. Again a much better manual with everything and no gaps and no intuitive is needed for Sync.

In conclusion this is a great buy as long as WD continues the free web service and free use of the name “MyCloud”. For comparison we later set up our own NAS at my house on a $150 Bee Box using NAS4Free and use the WinSCP publically available utility to span the net. This takes several hours to set up and is good but not as good as EX2. Recommended to everyone. Roe5685.