Brings a service similar to Dropbox to your own home but with greater capacity and at a lower price. Has all the functions of a home media server with the ability to go mobile. Flawlessly simple.
Storage comes on a single hard drive.
The launch of Western Digital's My Cloud marked an interesting turn for <span class="s1">Wired.co.uk -- it was the first time in years we felt genuinely, palpably excited by what is essentially a hard drive in a box. That's because what it does is put a service just like Dropbox in your own home, combines it with the best functions of a home media server, and crucially makes it flawlessly simple.
It's on sale now with 2TB of storage for £134, or 3TB of storage for £154.
Design
Aesthetically the My Cloud is simple: it's a hard drive, and it's in a plastic case. It's slim and sits discretely next to any router -- and it does have to be hardwired into said router by Ethernet.
It's quiet as a mouse, and in our testing in a home environment was as good as silent even when in use. Only in an exceptionally quiet room can you hear the hard drive spin, and that's only while it's being used to load content.
Features and performance
The My Cloud does several things: it can be simply used as an external hard drive-like backup device; it can be used as a cloud tool like Dropbox, with files and folders made publicly accessible via private links; and it can be used to host media such as movies and music, all of which can be streamed to computers or mobile devices via apps, within the home or outdoors via 3G or other people's Wi-Fi.
Pick any of these functions and you'll find yourself impressed. The most interesting use in our testing was as a media server. We loaded up several hundred gigabytes of our DVD backups, home videos in MP4 format, and our music collection stored in lossless audio formats from their CD source. With the files loaded onto the server they can be double-clicked and played within a Windows Explorer window or Finder window on OS X. It's like they're stored on a regular external hard drive.
However, using WD's My Cloud app things get more interesting. It's a simple but well-designed app and with it you can essentially build you own personal Netflix service. On iOS, you can browse through folders and hit play on any video, which will stream over your local network and play within the app itself (as long as your video format is supported by the playback device, so H.264 / MP4 format on iOS). This can also be AirPlayed over Wi-Fi to an Apple TV and played on a TV. The device streams progressively so you do not need to wait for the whole video to load before you start watching. Typically playback started within three or four seconds in a home environment.
You can also cache files as you might with Dropbox.
Select the checkbox next to whichever videos you plan on watching on a plane and the app simply saves local copies to be viewed offline. Better still, all of the above works just as well over 3G.
You need to register your device with WD's servers (it takes about a minute and is painless) and then logging into the app connects your mobile product with the My Cloud in your home or office. After that it makes no difference whether you're at home or work -- the service functions the same.
On Android the process is nearly identical, and multiple people can be given logins (so family members can stream any media you have loaded onto the drive, in or out of the home).
The slight difference is that Android doesn't allow for video files to play within the My Cloud app. Instead, they are cached and you would choose to open the file in whichever of your Android media players you prefer.
And if you fancy emailing a file to someone, just click the share button -- your recipient will be given a public link to download the file, which simply downloads directly from the My Cloud. Obviously you'll need a decent broadband connection to allow them to get that file quickly, so this might be a service better relied upon in corporate environments. Files can also be dropped onto the My Cloud via the app from wherever you are, so if you need to quickly offload some 1080p videos from that iPhone, that's a piece of cake.
As a backup device it's difficult to complain too, as it functions just like an external hard drive and folders are created within an operating system's native file management system.
It can also be used with OS X to be used as a Time Machine backup destination.
Conclusion
At this point it might have become clear we're big fans, and that's because we are. It has all but replaced Dropbox for us because the capacity is so much greater for the price; it replaced a media server, because it allowed us to stream media regardless of where we wanted to watch it.
The downsides to be aware of are that the storage comes on a single hard drive, so if it corrupts then all of your media eggs are crushed within the same disk-based basket. But you can manually backup the disk over USB to an external hard drive, which we'd recommend from time to time.
But really, you're looking at the most exciting consumer media server we've seen in years -- we relented from saying "home media server" because you don't even need to be at home to use it.
If this marks a new direction for Western Digital, it's one we're very excited to watch progress.
Serial Transfer Rate : USB 3.0 Serial Bus Transfer Rate (USB 3.0) 5 Gb/s (Max)/USB 2.0 Serial Bus Transfer Rate (USB 2.0) 480 Mb/s (Max)
Capacity : 3 TB
Size: Height 170.60 mm, Depth 139.30 mm, Width 49.0 mm
Weight: 0.96 kg
Current Requirements: AC Input Voltage 100-240 VAC/AC Input Frequency 47-63 Hz
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
