WD 2TB My Cloud Personal Network Attached Storage - NAS - WDBCTL0020HWT-NESN,White

The 2 Terabyte 'My Cloud' has the design almost of a simple-yet-elegant white box with silver edges and accents. A blue LED for power is the only light in the front. The device operates upright and runs cool and very quiet.The guide's images show how to connect My Cloud to a router. Once it's connected and powered, you simply open a browser to the setup URL provided in the guide. The URL redirects to a page with an image of the My Cloud device. Clicking the image starts setup. Links are presented on screen for downloading the required setup software. A wizard walks you through the quick software installation and then you are asked to provide a username and password to access your personal cloud. The personal cloud is what My Cloud is all about. It's Western Digital's secured cloud service that lets you access your data stored on My Cloud from anywhere. Once setup completes, you can create users, start uploading files to My Cloud, download mobile apps to access the device from Android or iOS, or backup your PC or Mac.The device comes with three preconfigured shared folders that from Windows, can be browsed from Explorer: Shared Music, Shared Pictures, and Shared Video. Back in the interface, the Home Page is the first page users see. It shows information in widget-like boxes. One box shows free disk space. There's a an arrow on the square that opens the box to display even more information— a breakdown of how much of the My Cloud space is taken up by music, videos, photos, or "other." I temporarily copied all the information (movies, music...ect) to those folders under User in Windows 8.1. I keep two copies of each folder, one on my third drive in the PC, and again on an external drive.Another box labeled Diagnosis shows information including system temperature, drive status, and firmware version.There's another section labeled Cloud Devices. It's empty save for a plus sign. Clicking the plus sign generated an activation code for users to enter into devices such as smartphones and tablets so these devices can access the data on My Cloud.The interface also provides information such as how many users are setup on the NAS; how many shares are setup; and the state of a feature called Content Scan. This is an option you can turn on or off where My Cloud will continual scan your home network for multimedia content.You can set permissions for users for any of the folder shares. I did find setting permission a little unintuitive, although once I figured out what I had to do it worked fine. You can set permissions by accessing the User or Folder sections of the interface.However, setting permissions' options were disabled in when I tried to apply permissions to a few test users and folders. I finally figured out that all folders by default are set with public permissions, meaning anyone has Read and Write access to all folders by default.I had to disable the Public sharing on any folder and then I was able to configure permissions. It may take some users a bit to figure this out, as the need to disable Public sharing is not made explicit in the interface (I found out what to do in support).Safepoints is a feature that allows users to take a snapshot of the entire My Cloud disk and restore the disk if needed. The snapshot is saved to an external USB drive attached to My Cloud or to another storage location on the network. I tested the feature by attaching a Western Digital My Passport USB drive to My Cloud. I had to close the browser and re-open it before the My Passport drive showed up in the My Cloud interface. To start using Safepoints, a wizard walks you through selecting the device you want to save the snapshot, giving the image a name and description, and setting up the schedule for snapshot taking. The feature works very much like Apple's Time Machine.In addition to the above capabilities, My Cloud supports SSH and FTP access to files, DLNA, iTunes and email notifications whenever there may be a system issue with the device. Working within the interface and applying settings was a bit peppier in performance than with the Seagate Central. One aspect of the My Cloud that makes me leery is that you are not prompted for login when you click on the shortcut from the desktop to get into the dashboard and I did not see a way to add authentication. The interface just opens up.The cloud in "My Cloud" is the remote access feature. The good thing about My Cloud is that data remains on the device in your possession and you are simply using Western Digital's cloud service to connect. Your data is not stored on its servers.You actually set up access to the cloud service when you first set up My Cloud. You are asked for an email address to which an activation link is sent. Once activated, you are given the link to log into the WD service. From this link, you can access the My Cloud from any browser no matter where you are located. I did purchase the pro version of WD Smartware Pro v. 2.4.1.9, also on the WD Cloud part of the site, the extra downloads are all there, Dropbox is another you'll need to install on other machines.

I see a lot of one-star reviews on this item, and I was about to join those who say that this unit is really slow and buggy. However, my impatience with it soon magnified my impatience with my internet connection. I was just SURE this device was the culprit that was causing the whole thing. Sometimes my Speakeasy speed tests would show speeds in the low-grade DSL range...and other times it would work satisfactorily, in the 12 to 13 Gb/s range. I was just SURE this WD box was dragging the whole thing down. Well...I decided to do a little investigating last night and found that I actually had NO CHANGE in my internet reliability when the MyCloud was completely unplugged (meaning no power cord, and no Ethernet cable connected). So, was my cable internet provider to blame? Well...that wouldn't make any sense, since the MyCloud doesn't rely on a connection to the outside world for internal network file transfers. But, just to get a good baseline for troubleshooting (something I do for a living with private and corporate aircraft) I decided to take my laptop to the router the MyCloud was connected to, and just make a wired Ethernet connection to it. Not only did the MyCloud work just as fast as any other drive on my laptop, but my Speakeasy speed tests were now in the STRATOSPHERE! I was getting a consistent 50+ Gb/s reading. So, obviously, my WiFi connection is to blame. I downloaded a free app for my HTC Evo Droid phone called WiFi Analyzer, and found that it was actually the location of my router and apartment living that was causing all my issues...every issue I've had with my network for the last 6 years can now be attributed to this. That app showed me the MASSIVE number of other routers around me, and some were actually sending a stronger signal to my normal laptop and computer location, on the same channel. I found that my signal to noise ratio for WiFi from my wireless router was TERRIBLE...even though its just a couple of rooms away (950 square foot apartment). So, I decided to move my cable modem/wireless router and MyCloud out to my living room, where most of my stuff will stream to and from. I made a hard-wired Ethernet connection to my gaming rig (which is connected to my surround sound system and my 46" HD TV) and the Speakeasy test on that is consistently above 56Gb/s now. The laptop? I'm getting a reliable 30-40Gb/s now. My MyCloud? I can now access it from anywhere in my apartment, and it acts like its physically attached to what I'm accessing it from. Fantastic speed. As for a complaint I saw about "it does NOT sync"? Western Digital makes no claim in ANY of their documentation that it does. They simply tell you that you can set up a continuous backup which will automatically back up any files that get added. Not sure how anybody can interpret that to mean that it will also delete files that you delete from your primary. What good would that be? Sometimes...at least speaking for me anyway...we accidentally delete things we don't mean to delete...and we even empty the Recycle Bin! Oops...now its gone forever! Or is it? Thanks to how this drive works, you CAN get it back, because IT never deletes ANYTHING without your consent. Which is a good thing! BTW...to the guy who complained about this...it, in fact, DOES know when you've deleted something. Its software marks that file by drawing a line through its filename so you can easily see its something you chose to delete on your primary. BUT...its not actually gone on the MyCloud...you can get it back if you deleted it by mistake! This is a problem for you?!! LOL! Sorry...just have to give you a hard time over that.GREAT PRODUCT if you take your time to troubleshoot poor performance. It even led me to fix my entire network...and now I'm KICKING MYSELF saying "Why didn't you do this sooner?!!"