WD 4TB My Cloud EX2 Ultra Network Attached Storage - NAS - WDBVBZ0040JCH-NESN

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Western Digital

WD 4TB My Cloud EX2 Ultra Network Attached Storage - NAS - WDBVBZ0040JCH-NESN

Regular price: €443,00
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Description

Centralized network storage and access from anywhere with computers or mobile devices, In RAID 1 mode, the RAID controller duplicates all data from one drive to a second drive in the drive group. RAID 1 provides complete data redundancy but cuts the required storage capacity in half.
High-performance 1.3 GHz dual-core processor and 1GB memory for seamless media streaming and ultra-fast file transfers
Milestone Arcus Surveillance software with unlimited camera licenses,Multiple RAID options:With the RAID settings of the My Cloud EX2 Ultra, you can customize your system with the configuration that's best for you. Use RAID 0 for enhanced performance, RAID 1 for mirrored data protection, or a JBOD / spanning structure for non-RAID configurations.
Multiple RAID configurations and automatic backup options to help guard important data
Automatic file synching across all your computers for up-to-date access from anywhere
Includes 2 x 2TB drives (1.96TB usable capacity in RAID 1)

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Customer Reviews

Nifty little prosumer NAS (4-bay) This review is for the WD EX4100 (4-bay), as Amazon has decided to merge reviews for the 2-bay and 4-bay.Edit: After 6 months of use, I have the following information to add:1. The "drive failure" notice appears for drives without disks inserted. This can be mitigated somewhat by scheduling periodic downtime.2. The write speed is (obviously) still limited by the HDD you use and your network connection.3. WD documentation is still less than stellar and they still over-rely on group support boards.4. To enable dual-bonding on the gigabit ports, enable 802.3ad.5. You should not be utilizing older/personal drives. The WD RED 5400 RPM drive is likely going to be your best choice for the drive due to stability/longevity compared to the 7200 RPM version - unless of course you choose to go with the WD Black instead.6. Again, the "EX" in the "EX4" stands for "Expert". It is supposed to be an indicator for those less technically-inclined that this is a bit more than a "plug-and-play" solution.Original Review:First and foremost: This device is not as straightforward as some other types of devices designed towards the home user. You will need to dedicate time and brainpower to setup and management of any Enterprise Solution that you buy (hence the product featuring the use of EX for Expert). If you like everything to work without you doing anything more than pushing the "next" button on an install wizard, this is not for you.I decided to purchase this Network Attached Storage after running a spare PC as a media server for a while. I purchased a WD Red 8TB drive separate as it was cheaper than the bundled version of the EX4100 with 2 4TB drives. The max storage handling for this solution is 32TB, or 4 8TB drives. I decided to run JBOD for the time being, with a separate backup for critical files.Included in the box is a setup guide that is effective for about 15 seconds. The expectation is that you (the person setting it up) will navigate to WD's website to access proper setup guides. As far as the actual setup, it's not too complicated: Insert drives; power on (takes a minute to initialize); access control interface via a computer on the local network; configure RAID (even if JBOD); format drives; setup "shares" for file storage; and access the shares via network discovery on your computer.One issue that I had was a ticking sound from the hard drive every 5 seconds. According to WD's website, this is normal for their enterprise drives in standby mode. Their drives are rather noisy (although most Enterprise systems are, to be fair;) and this may impact where you wish to place the device.You will need to wire it in to your router (assuming you are using a home router/switch/WAP combo). A CAT-5 cable ("Network" or "Ethernet" Cable sold in stores) can support 10Mbps transfer easily, but 100Mbps is not so likely if the cable is longer than a certain distance (or if you forget to account for TCP overhead). With the cable I am using, I see ~90Mbps transfer. This translates to ~11MBps, which is important to consider as files are measured in Bytes, not bits (8 bits a Byte; a 700MB file is 5,600Mb). There is an included Gigabit cable, although it is (by necessity) ~3 feet long. This calculates to 125MBps, but one needs to still consider all other legs of transport for speed. For a car analogy: A Bugatti Veyron will not be able to travel at 200mi/h while in gridlocked traffic.If you have a lot of files that you plan on transferring from an external device (such as a portable HDD) onto the NAS, I recommend connecting the device to the USB drive on the front of the NAS. Next, you should navigate to the control panel via your computer. Use the "backup" function to have the NAS copy files from relevant folders within the external device into the location on the NAS that you want them to reside. This way, you don't have to utilize your network nor computer to have the files copy. The "backup" function is also a way to setup an automatic backup of critical files to another location, should you choose to utilize this function. For regular use where you are copying small files a few at a time, use of the fileshare (via Network Discovery on your computer) works well.My biggest concern with the device is actually with it's control interface. The default interface is port 80, and does not support port 443 (HTTPS) connections. This includes the login function and device administration. You can enable SSH once you have setup the device; but that doesn't change the aforementioned issue. The interface will also allow you to attempt to do things that could be predicted to fail, such as trying to install Plex Media Server if you have no drives configured (hangs at 98%). The page does have a timeout function, which is nice. Still, I would not recommend this device for a true Enterprise solution.For Plex users: This device does decently with direct stream. If your files are .mp4 (the MP4 container) or .mkv and using H264 (video playback) or H265 (HVEC) and AAC, MP3, or FLAC for audio, you should be able to play the file well. .avi (AVI container) is not supported by the Plex client (as it costs money for the license), nor is DTS passthrough, so the Media Server will try to transcode it. The EX4100 is not powerful enough to transcode, so you cannot play such files if using this device as the server. You can use a more powerful device (such as your computer) as the server, and host the files on the NAS; or use a tool such as Handbrake to convert the files to a direct play format.Overall, I like the product. I think it does a decent job at balancing Enterprise capabilities with home-use requirements. The cost of the device, initial setup requirements, lackluster in-box documentation, and lack of standard network security protocols are the biggest issues that I see with this device. 4Great NAS solutionThis has ended my saga of trying to build cheap, fast, high-availability storage for my home network. I have several USB drives connected to a headless server, and I wanted to create a single point of backup for those individual devices, as well as system imaging (i.e.: Time Machine) and generally make all of my data accessible to any machine on the network. I tried various multi-drive RAID USB-attached storage solutions and none of them were working well in my Linux environment. Finally I just bit the bullet and went true NAS (over Ethernet) as opposed to trying to let my server handle it at USB3 speeds and every little finicky problem and annoyance I had has gone away. The setup was easy, once you learn the interface, and so far it has been up for every connection I've attempted to make to it. It doesn't slow to a crawl on long file transfer operations and average speed seems good (considering that most of the copy operations originate from USB2 devices). When copying directly from a PC to the EX2 instead of from another USB device, I've only ever broken into the high 50MB/s range, but that's still quite a bit better than the 25MB/s average I get when archiving from USB2 onto the EX2.5Great Drive With Periods Of Frustration This is a nice piece of electronics that is easy to setup and use. Many RAID modes available including JBOD (Just a bunch of drives) for the most storage space. On setup everything worked and it was easy to access from most anywhere. Then the problems started. The drive periodically disappears from my Network. Many people have mentioned this problem and there are lots of fixes listed. First I turned off Sleep mode thinking that somehow was contributing to the problem. I also gave the drive a Static IP. No matter what settings I tweaked the drive still disappears from my Network about 3 times a week. I have not found a fix that can get it back online other than unplugging the power supply and letting it refresh itself. When I do this the drive is back online in about 5 minutes and remains online until it decides to run away and hide again. I'm kind of disappointed in Western Digital as they are a good company that usually addresses these kind of problems. Since I owned this drive I have gotten 3 or 4 firmware updates from WD. Each time I hope that they have finally found and fixed the problem but this has not yet happened. for the High Price WD expects for this drive I believe they should have fixed this long ago. I don't know if any of the other big drives like this from other companies work any better. This drive was all that I wanted and needed for my system but if I had it to do over I would have bought a smaller setup that from the reviews I have read seem more stable. (I have a WD Cloud drive in 4tb that has been rock solid for many years.) I wish that WD would make this much more expensive drive work as well - but it doesn't! 3Ugh, wish it would workI really wanted to like this, but it just doesn't work well. Before I purchased it I called WD and talked to a very friendly tech to make sure it could do what I was looking for, which is to remotely back up my laptop as I travel whenever I connect to the internet. He assured me that if I bought this model and used one of their programs (WD Sync) that it would. When it arrived I was having some trouble so I replied to the last email from the tech and he called me a few hours later. We spent over two hours on the phone trying to get it set up, but their software is full of bugs. It crashes and won't reopen, forcing me to uninstall and reinstall it four times. The tech was very helpful, took his time with me, but we could never get it to work. I have no idea how well the hardware works because we could never get it setup properly. It's going back tomorrow.1So Far So GoodAfter using this NAS for over a month, I am very happy with everything so far. Reason for only four stars is because the software setup was not easy. I ordered the NAS and hard drives separately, and physically installing the drives was the easy part. Once the unit booted up, I had a hard time getting the drives to mount. I spent a long time looking at the support pages at WD without finding a simple solution. Finally, thanks to Google searches, YouTube, and online forum posts, I was able to get this thing up and running. In my opinion, this is not as simple as "plug-and-play" for most average users. Problem was having to go into the RAID settings in order to setup my NAS as JABOD, which is confusing. In any case, once everything was up and running, the unit as been working flawlessly. We are using it for TimeMachine backups from three different Mac computers, and as host for huge iTunes library and photo archive. Highly recommended if you want to backup multiple computers, or keep a your data secure on your own private cloud. Might seem a little expensive at first, but really this NAS is a great value when you compare it to the cost of paying $10/month or more for iCloud, Google or Dropbox. You control your own cloud device, and it has all the same features that the paid cloud services offer.4Unreliable. DON'T BUYI'm shocked that these WD cloud devices are rated so high by so many sites. I did a lot of research before buying this WD Ultra EX2. I was tenative about buying because I had a 1 TB device from them about 8-9 years ago and hated the interface and sluggishness of its backup. I bought a Seagate 4TB about 2 years ago that has been great but was now ready to have a wifi cloud in the home to keep on top of all the photos/videos and work stuff that I want to ensure I don't lose. After months of trying to get this to do what it's supposed to do with my Macbook pro, and iPhones, I can strongly say that this device is unreliable and pure JUNK. It never backups everything wether handled manually or through their auto backup process with the phones. Tons of stuff is always skipped over and missed. How can I trust this to back anything up!?! It's painful to know I wasted $400. Thinking I'd eventually get it worked out. I finally decided to contact WD to get a refund but I doubt they will. They'll blame me, my internet connection, or amazon. DO NOT BUY THIS!1Overall An Excellent NAS Device If you need a lot of storage you really do need a Network Attached Storage device, commonly called a NAS. I've been using this EX4100 from Western Digital for a while and am overall pleased with the unit. I will tell you right up front that it would have been an easy 5-star review if not for a problem with the system's fan that required a return.The setup of the device was fast and simple. Normally I'd buy the NAS hardware and the hard disc drives separate but the Western Digital Red drives are what I wanted and this was both easier to order and at a great price-point. Once the device was turned on, using the WD software, I was able to quickly and easily access the web control panel from my PC.The speeds I'm getting from this device are excellent and I have no problem streaming audio or video from the device. It runs nice and quiet and I do enjoy the LED display to let you know the status of the unit.Unfortunately, after a system software update, the fan stopped operating which generated an error code that told me to contact WD support. I did, they suggested trying the latest firmware so I did. That fixed the issue for a while. A few firmware updates later and the fan stopped working immediately after one of the updates. I contacted WD support again and got an RMA number for the unit. I received a refurbished unit in exchange that has been working perfectly since I received it and swapping the four drives was a quick and easy process.Overall, this device provides you with a nice amount of storage and performs quite well for the price-point. I think it would be perfect for all home environment and even some light commercial environments. My wife's company purchased the 2-bay version to backup all of their company PCs and their unit has been rock solid as well. Recommended. 4This review will save you money and headache and fraustration This is a really good product but only on PAPER. Following is the biggest issue that I have with this product that will literary makes it useless.First off, a quick background on me, Im a network engineer and my job is to manage and configure networking products on daily basis. With that said, this SAN is not stable when it is onna network. This means that for the first couple of days, you can connect to the dashboard from your network and remotely, but after that it goes missing from every point of connection, meaning you cannot connect to the unit or the dashboard regardless of what you do. The worst part about this is that all the information on the little blue screen located on the unit shows everything is working fine. There is a physical power button in front of the unit but it does not do anything regardless of how long you hold it. It is as if the unit just hangs and freezes. The only way to reset the unit is to disconnect the power cable which is really the last thing I want to do with products that have spinning disks in them. My mistake was not returning this in time and thinking that I can fix it. For those of you having this issue or thinking about buying it, all the solutions that are on the forums online, such as setting static ip and doing system restore, WILL NOT fix this issue. I called WD support and instead of trying to trouble shoot the problem, they are just going to RMA it. What really pissed me off was that, they told me that they are going to pay for the shipping this one time as curtesy. So basically, your product is faulty and I have to pay for it to get shipped back?!!! this is just absurd. Please save your money and DO NOT buy this junk.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Update 8/8I have now called WD about 8 times to get one simple pre-paid shipping label for their defective product. This is 2017 and WD is unable to provide a simple shipping label because "their servers are down". Apparently it takes them more than a week to fix their servers. This is one of the worst companies I have ever dealt with specially when it comes to customer service. Please save your money and time and stay away from them. I wish I could give them 0 stars. 1Product came used from Amazon (even though I bought a new one!) and lasted all of 2 monthsI originally gave it 4 stars; see why I changed that below.The product is a great NAS. It is simple to use, and has RAID1 option (so all the data is duplicated over 2 HDDs), which is why I bought this one (I had a previous version with only 1 disk, and that disk failed; it was a pain to recover the data!). This newer version allows you to keep apps in the unit (like antivirus and some other things), which is really nice.My only worry is that the unit I got (which came directly from Amazon!) was a used unit. How do I know that? Because it came with a password, and when I took the password off (resetting it manually), I found out that users were assigned and there was data (movies and music) recorded to the drive. Now, the drive is working fine, but I paid for a new unit and did not receive one. The only reason I did not return it is that I brought it to my house in Central America, and returning it from here will cost me money, but this is not right!Had it not been for that, I would have rated it 5 stars (not anymore; read on!)UPDATE: Well it has been less than 2 months now, and believe it or not, the unit is acting up. I am not sure if it is the HDDs or the software or what, but even accessing it through the IP address it is SUPER slow!! I bet it has to do with the fact that I got a used unit!!! What sucks even more is that because I brought it with me abroad, now I have to pay international shipping costs to send it back!!! INCREDIBLE!UPDATE 2: The unit is super simple to set up, and the Plex media server is a thing of beauty (when the unit actually works). However, about 3 times per week, the unit decides to disconnect itself from the network. It simply disappears. And no, it is not a window thing, as my TV's cannot see it as a server either... From what I have read, this is a common problem (one I did NOT have with my previous WD MyCloud unit!), and I have yet to find a cause (it is not sleep mode or IP changes). Just wish WD would solve the problem with their firmware updates, but, alas, no fix yet! Do not waste your money. The whole point of having a NAS is to be able to access it!1Hardware is fine, supportig software is unreliable.* Update 01/11/2018 * I'm officially giving up on this NAS and will be replacing it with another one from a different manufacturer. Syncing now never works outside of my home network. I also can't access the dashboard anymore even when I'm connected to my home network. Using this device has been nothing but 7 months of inconsistent performance and frustrating software issues that seem to have no resolution. Don't be fooled by Western Digital's answer to this review - it did absolutely nothing to help. Only thing left for me to do now is decide whether I'd want to attempt to sell this thing off (dunno that I could in good conscience) or burn it.* Original Review* Five months of use and I'm still running into the same recurring problems with the WD Sync software. It'll stop syncing intermittently, showing a "No internet connection detected" message while my computer clearly has internet access. When it's not that it hangs at "Signing in to MyCloudEX2Ultra" or it reports that the device is missing. I've tried rebooting the device, adjusting settings within the Dashboard, adjusting settings on the router, adjusting firewall/malware settings on my computer and uninstalling and reinstalling the WD Sync software numerous times - nothing works. A firmware update didn't help, either. The software just appears to be extremely temperamental and unpredictable. When it does work, it's great, and automatically syncs and backs up files between my desktop and laptop as expected. Unfortunately, however, I'm frequently forced to use the My Cloud web interface to manually upload or retrieve files. At least I can say that the hardware has been reliable and I haven't experienced any data corruption or loss like other users have reported. Still, this system isn't exactly working as expected and the software issues are really frustrating. I'm aware that numerous other users have reported similar problems but, unfortunately, it appears that the support Western Digital offers is severely lacking, and user-run support forums are confusing, irrelevant or lead to dead-ends.1Worth the costI will edit this review at a later date. Till then this should be considered an initial review only.Just got this NAS to help me backup my photography as well as give me access to all my files on the drive while away. This drive does all I need it to. I had it setup within minutes. I've read plenty of reviews saying the setup was a hassle. Not true, at least not for me. I didn't have to forward any ports. I just plugged it in, let it setup, and was off and running within 5 mins or less. When I transferred my entire photography folder (119 GB alone), it took it roughly 25 - 30 mins I'd say. Really wasn't rushing it due to the hard drives are NAS drives and it was trasferring over a network so its not going to be lightning fast unless you got a gigabyte connection, or even then, your not gonna get the speed like you would if it was internal. But for me, this little NAS works great.Noise -I did see a couple of reviews that said it can be loud. I don't like the sound of my computer running at night so normally I turn it off, With this, I didn't notice it was even there. It has a power scheduler built in to turn it into hibernate mode (I think, haven't tested this), but even leaving it on regular powered up mode, its quiet enough to be discrete.Why 4 Stars?I have to side with 4 stars only because I think the interface is a bit disorganized. I think they started very well or maybe they've been improving over the years but the interface doesn't seem efficient to me. You have to switch over to multiple tabs to get the job you are trying to do done. The functionally is there with this device though. It has a great amount of features that are working great and i'm looking forward to using it to its fullest potential.4Great Hardware, not sold on the WD software (yet)So I ordered the 16tb EX2 through through Amazon and it was fulfilled by HPP Enterprises - who as luck would have it sent me the diskless version instead - and whom despite excessive correspondence refused to fulfill with the correct unit and were unnecessarily painful to deal with. So one month after they confirmed receipt of the return and I'm still awaiting their refund. Don't purchase anything which is fulfilled by HPP Enterprises as they are clearly administratively challenged or perhaps worse.As far as the product goes I ultimately purchased directly from WD. The product is actually well designed and well built, albeit crazy slow (likely do solely to the software). I have about 5.5 TB of pics & movies and some music and this has been running several weeks and is only 80% complete on the initial backup running WD Sync with the device in raid 1. I suspect in the future it would be unnoticeable with singular files over my gig network, but this initial Sync is frustrating. In fairness I get sporadic messages about not being unable to Sync certain files and that it would re-try shortly, so maybe it hangs in between. I haven't spent much time focused on the software as backing up to a 16tb WD Duo (great device as well) gave me comfort for a backup prior to receiving this unit. I'll explore root cause at some point. Speed aside utilizing WD Sync, I like the device. The drives are quiet, the unit is not unattractive and frankly its setup was easier than other WD cloud devices I've used in the past. I am a long-term fan of WD products, but as most WD users realize their software is often not their strong suit, but from a hardware perspective its seems great, I can move files to and from it rapidly within explorer and utilize it fully as a NAS, but wish they would include some better software. I was excited to see that they now have support for PLEX and do intend to set it up in the future and will advise how that worked out in a follow up.4Device Admin screen slows in direct proportion to the number of files saved on the device - really bad design!This should be an embarrassment to a company which has always had reliable and fast storage solutions in the past. This device is a huge fail from an admin perspective. I purchased this in Dec 2017, with put 2 4TB disks in it in Raid1 configuration. Over time - the admin interface started to slow down - almost to the point where the web browser times out before it refreshes. Had two separate support calls - and essentially I was told I need to free up 20% of disk space, and turn off all file sharing services, to improve speed - which I did - but still no luck. I did some troubleshooting on my own and concluded the "Capacity" widget on the Home Admin screen literally traverses my entire hard disk, all 1.5 million files, every time it is clicked - because of this the rest of the UI is inaccessible until it returns with the disk utilization by filetype. If the device happens to be doing something else in the background (like a backup, or its own maintenance tasks) I can't even get access to the admin tool. If I log on as a non admin user - it doesn't do this - instead it just shows total space and total free space.1Do not Waste $1K, buy an external Harddisk instead. Very disappointing experience. Returning the device after 15 days.I spent 3 days setting it up and backing up 1.4 TB of my PC data. The level 2 technical support was very good for initial set up.The problem started 10 days later, when the SmartWare softare stopped recognizing Ex4100 on the network.. The Level 2 support team uninstalled SmartWare software indicating it was no longer supported and installed a different version of SmartWare. This version could not recognize the 1.4 TB of backed up data any more. The Level 2 escalation team confirmed that that is how the software works.Wow ! So every time they sun-set a software or you end up unistall and reinstall the software as part of debugging, you will have to re-create the backup from scratch. The previous back up is unusable as you cannot restore automatically or take backups incrementally any more. For me, it meant manually coping 1.4 TB data.. or start from scratch and create a whole new back-up set which, was going to take another 24-30 hours if everything worked fine..This was very disappointing after spending $1,000. I could have just spent $100 at Costco and bought a 2TB Seagate drive and manually copied my data. I hope there is a more robust and reliable system out there. 1Ideal for personal NAS StorageI did a TON of research on my personal NAS storage options and it always led back to the Western Digital products. I'm not in IT and didn't want the advance options that most NAS storage products provide nor did I want to build my own with the diskless options. However, I was in a dire need to remove my myself from having to attach my external drive to my devices all the time.The My Cloud EX2 Ultra is ideal in the sense that it provides your basic need to go wireless when backing up your data and provide the ability to stream and share data across devices as well. The setup was simple and there was some time spent to become familiar with the terminology and software features. As most of the reviews stated the UI isn't anything to brag about but that was the least of my concerns as I only required the ability to see how much was being stored, where it was stored, who has access, and what is the status of the hard drives overall.This was a great investment and I'm very happy with my purchase, again this product is ideal for novice users not advance as there appears to be some logical features missing. Lastly, I have not encountered any buffering issues whatsoever, not sure if others have bandwidth issues but there has been no degradation when streaming videos in 1080p.5

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WD 4TB My Cloud EX2 Ultra Network Attached Storage - NAS - WDBVBZ0040JCH-NESN

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WD 4TB My Cloud EX2 Ultra Network Attached Storage - NAS - WDBVBZ0040JCH-NESN

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WD 4TB My Cloud EX2 Ultra Network Attached Storage - NAS - WDBVBZ0040JCH-NESN

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