WD Diskless My Cloud EX2 Ultra Network Attached Storage
WD Diskless My Cloud EX2 Ultra Network Attached Storage
Enhanced data protection
With WD SmartWare Pro backup software, PC users can customize when and where their content is saved, while Mac users have full access to Apple Time Machine for personalized backup. You can even automatically back up your data to a separate My Cloud NAS device, or any supported cloud service like Amazon S3, or ElephantDrive. Combined with 256 AES volume encryption, you can securely store files across your entire network, regardless of OS.
Centralise, organise and stream with Plex
The Plex Media Server keeps all your photos, videos and music beautifully organised and prepared for streaming to your PC, mobile device, game console, or other media player. Enrich your media with plot summaries, posters, album covers and enjoy it from home or on the go.
 |  | |
|---|---|---|
| My Cloud EX4100 | ||
| Ideal for | Prosumers and Creative professionals | Prosumers and Creative professionals |
| Number of bays | Two-bay | Four-bay |
| Capacity | 0 TB/Diskless, 4 TB, 6 TB, 8 TB, 12 TB, 16 TB, 20 TB, 28TB | 0 TB/Diskless, 8 TB, 16 TB, 24 TB, 32 TB, 40 TB, 56TB |
| Processor | Marvel ARMADA 385 1.3 GHz dual-core | Marvel ARMADA 388 1.6 GHz dual-core |
| RAM | 1GB | 2GB |
| Gigabit Ethernet Interface | 1X | 2X |
| USB 3.0 ports | 2X – back side | 2X – back side; 1X – direct copy port, front side |
| Weight: | 800 g |
| Dimensions: | 15.49 x 9.91 x 17.14 cm; 800 Grams |
| Brand: | Western Digital |
| Model: | WDBVBZ0000NCH-EESN |
| Colour: | Black |
| Batteries Included: | No |
| Manufacture: | Western Digital |
| Dimensions: | 15.49 x 9.91 x 17.14 cm; 800 Grams |
I had one earlier after move missing it so brought work as expected. Plex just work out of box. No need to get costly cloud storage as 4Tb more than enough to store photo and video with raid 1 to survive a disk crash.
Happy with purchase
The My Cloud EX2 Ultra is easy to setup and attach to your existing Wi Fi.
My Ex2 Ultra device was already setup for RAID 1 which is the type of security I wanted and it was just a matter of creating a network drive on my PC, I could then start backup up my PC and saving my photos to the drive.
There is a great choice of utilities to download, but to date, I have only used the anti-virus scanner.
Good for what it was designed for, easy set up & Easy backup from windows machines, not used the cloud backup or remote access for backing up other devices. A good consumer NAS, but limited flexibility for anything more complicated. One star for WIFI as I didnt know it had this function and therefore never used i
Not a lot to say really, plugged it in, powered it up. Spent a day copying files onto it from an old NAS. All content works fine using DLNA server to all TVs/iPads in the house. Defaulted to RAID1 so have two copies of all important data.
It is when you are activating other features that it can get a little clunky, like access to files away from home etc. The interface is not great and often takes a little while to load up.
That said, there are one-click installs for a bunch of neat stuff that you can use to gain extra utility from your My Cloud.
I was looking at other more ‘advanced’ solutions, but for Mac users there really is not much point to anything more than this for your Time Machine setup. I have some shared folders for transferring files between my machines, I have a few synced directories (no version control – so be careful) and some public-facing directories. I have yet to utilise any web server features but might test a one-click WordPress install soon.
units, paired as primary and backup boxes. They store my professional photographs, vectors, and other client work. One unit failed, although the drives were fine it was the chassis that ceased to function. Having saved the configuration offline it was simple to restore my drive when the replacement diskless unit arrived. Back live in under half an hour.
I have given this device to my Daughter. Therefore I cannot give it a full review. I did help her to set it up and we did not encounter and serious issues. I have had such cloud devices in the past and therefore had an idea about what to do.
It provides oodles of on-line storage and has helped her to keep the files she wants whilst clearing down her phone and computer.
All in all just the job.
Nice item, had the earlier OS3 device for years that worked faultlessly, so upgraded to this new OS5 unit. Plugged it in, recognised straight away and set up in minutes.
There are a few differences, the new OS5 app will only upload photos from an iPhone in HEIC format, whereas the OS3 app would upload in JPEG. I just use a converter program on the PC to change them over so it’s no major hassle, but it would be nice to be able to choose. The new app also doesn’t show you what’s in the folder when choosing where to upload them, whereas the older one did – not sure why they remove useful functionality with upgrades. Also, the fans can be a bit noisy when running, which is not all the time, usually just after you’ve uploaded a load of photos, and it starts processing the images for cloud preview.
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However, I couldn’t see anything else that offers 28TB in a similar price range and only a few days after deciding against purchasing, Amazon emailed me with a substantial price reduction in the product – so I decided to give it a go.
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The unit arrived in quick time, seemed like plug and play but the software was a bit frustrating to use. I had to download software that was outdated then had to download the updated software to overwrite the old software & I still don’t quite get the system for adding devices (I am a noob to this though!).
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I started having issues and spoke with WD online help to see if I was doing something wrongit turned out both drives in the unit were faulty and did not work.
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I spoke to Amazon and had a replacement unit the next day and had to repost the one I had. Much to my annoyance – the second unit also had faulty drives! What are the odds?
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So I spoke to Both WD & Amazon online help and said that I was really unhappy at having 2 faulty units in succession but was prepared to give it one more shot. This time the box arrived in a cellophane package, so I knew it was brand new, never opened whereas I’m now suspicious of just how new the first 2 units that were sent to me were – because they were sealed by Amazon tape – so might have been returns?
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So a couple of weeks down the line – everything seems to be working and I have just about everything backed up through the wifi connection to the unit. One of my mobiles seems to be backing up regularly, which is great – but I haven’t figured out how to automatically back up my computer – so at the moment I’ve just been manually backing up files when I get a chance.
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If anything changes I’ll edit the review but it’s currently 3rd time lucky.
I love the small form factor of this, it takes up very little room on my desk. If you’ve read the other reviews you know there are some issues with regards to the software, as a result I didn’t update the firmware to the latest version. To avoid any potential vulnerabilities I simply turned off the external access which I didn’t really need anyway.
Setup was a tiny bit obscure but once I got in to the web portal it was fine. Transfer of all my pictures and videos etc was fine, faster than I anticipated tbh. Left it overnight for pics and then another night for videos/movies.
I use my pc as a Plex server but stream the content from the NAS. No issues with streaming, works perfectly.
Overall I am very happy with the purchase and the RAID setup gives me some peace of mind!
I’m using this primarily as a network backup device (Time Machine and Windows). Its easy enough to setup, and now its running seems reliable.
Its noisy – I have sat mine on some anti-vibration mounts to try and dampen that
Disappointed that it shipped with Firmware two versions out of date, with the final step to MyCloud OS 5 fundamentally changing the product – I wish I had done all the upgrades before starting to use i
After the update, i lost all my data, my access and everithing! The sistem dont allow me to access my old account, dont allow me to create a new account, even if i restore to factory settings and restart with a new accounts, new e-mails, when you finish, noting gonna work and will start to show messages like, wrong password, access denied, this accound is already logged in or even you dont have internet access, but i’m on the internet to set it up ! After 1 month they made some updates and it is working well now
The UI is a bit painful on first delivery because you have to set all sorts of things up before you even get to the “update firmware” option. However, once updated things get better – passwords can’t have some “special characters” in them, which is a bit of a security fail, but with the later versions at least you can use long passwords.
You can turn off most of the bells and whistles, so you can get down to a super-simple NAS, and yes, you can get rsync if you turn on SSH (no other config really required, unless you really want to). Here things work well as you’d expect for a device such as this. There’s enough CPU in the box to saturate the disk and make a good dent in the network too, so saving and reading files to/from the NAS is as you’d want it to be – it’s got spinning disks, so obviously not as fast as SSD.
The UI stays perky even under load, and is well laid out with everything you need easy to find, so not the bewildering array of disjointed menus and “apps”, popups and sidebars that you’ll find on a QNAP. For normal people, this is probably an important selling point 😉
As I say, I haven’t delved into the “apps” side of this NAS too much – there aren’t very many to choose from, but that’s probably also a good thing (I’d imagine the ones that they do offer are at least reasonably well crafted and documented). I wouldn’t go expecting to install and use everything simultaneously, as this is just a “little” NAS, but it does have reasonable CPU/RAM, so I’m sure a few apps will work fine.
Lastly, this NAS is pretty quiet. With no load it makes very little noise at all. When it’s working hard for a few minutes the fan spins up a bit, but even then it’s far from an offensively loud device. It’s probably okay sat behind your telly or something if you can’t hide it away in a cupboard.
All in all, this is a pretty cheap, reasonably well featured and decently performing NAS. It’s not going to break any speed records, nor is it going to mine bitcoins, but it’s pretty decent for what it is.
I never had one of these before, so it was a learning curve for me. With recent Windows 10 updates, I had to use SMB V2. But with help from web sites, it’s working perfectly. I had this for a year now and 2 firmware updates have been released my WD. WD listen to users feedback, the last firmware was in Dec 2020 (writing this review in Jan 2021) and it’s so much easier to use.
There was some ‘bloatware pre-installed’ apps on the device, but the Dec 2020 firmware update removed all of these… you can always re-enable them (easily) if you wish.
The device could be better if WD would create an app for an NTP Server.
I have mapped the drives in Windows 10 and can access then using Android tablets and also via my Android phone. There is great support for this device on the web. I would buy this again.
Update: The drive indexes everything if you set up remote access to a share. I takes AGES. I backed up to the drive in November and it is still indexing the content and generating thumbnail images. There is a LOT about this on the WD forums. If you do not require access via the phone app, turn it off to speed up this action. The drive has not entered sleep mode yet as it has been running constantly to complete the indexing process. Still a good drive though.
I made the mistake of leaving this device over 6 months to install so my WD support had elapsed before I set it up. However I was very relieved to find it was very easy to install and I needed no help to do it. Once you’ve installed it you can setup users, shares, quotas, or backup schedules as required to suit your needs. Personally I set mine up to use a RAID scheme, this effectively halves the storage space but if one of the 2 drives inside malfunctions, all I have to do is replace the faulty drive and I don’t lose any data.
A previous comment surprised me regarding the capacity only being 16TB as I have around 9.7TB available to me which would be around 19.4TB without the RAID setup. I can only assume he ordered the wrong version of the product i.e. the 16TB version.
Usage:
I love that you don’t have to use some nasty flash/java/whatever interface to use it. You can just use windows explorer and type “\MyCloudEX2Ultrasharename” or use it’s IP address instead to access it and hey presto you can copy/paste/play whatever you want from that location. I suggest then assigning a drive letter to it so you only have to click the drive in the future.
It is also accessible through the Living room TV (Android Interface) which is connected to the network via Wifi so using it as a media centre is easy too.
Unfortunately I can’t comment on the backup facilities due to not using them but I’d imagine it would be reliable
Pros:
Easy to setup, and you have WD to back you up for the first 6 months should you have issues
Networks easily and properly
Works well as a media centre.
Cons:
Shutting down (or Hibernate) this device is is not so simple. There is no on/off/hibernate button so you have to login to the device as an admin and click Hibernate. It’s not a good idea to just cut the power as this could interrupt write operations or worse still firmware updates (REALLY BAD!!!). I generally realise this after I’ve shut the computer down which means I have to boot it up again or use my mobile just to do this. If you’re wondering why I bother doing this at all, it’s because even when Idle it generates heat which implies using a fair bit of electricity. Therefore when it’s not in use I prefer to shut it down.
Starting up is a little annoying too as there is no on button, so you have to go to the wall socket, toggle the switch, or pull and reinsert the power cable to the unit. I don’t like pulling cables out repeatedly, and the socket might not be easily accessible.
Summary:
Very good, quick and easy to use and setup. Would have got full marks if it had not been for the lack of an on/off/hibernate button on the device itself.
WD MyCloud, I use Acronis backup, provides me the protection and assurance that I wont lose anything important again, and it is all scheduled so I don’t need to do anything.
MyCloud also offers the central storage of my pictures and music which I have made available to all devices in my network, this works perfectly as well.
I really do rate the device, there are lots of options for apps, cloud access, shares, users etc although I only use it for a relatively simple and straightforward operation, but if that is all you want then I highly recommend it.
My MyCloud is hidden away in a cupboard, but that’s not to say its not to shabby on the old eyes!!
This is a fast NAS drive giving me about 100MB/s transfer speed which is about all you can expect get out of a 1Gbps network.
Standard WD NAS web interface which is workable but not advanced. Do not expect the level of detail and functionality that a synology gives you but this is not trying to be a NAS/Server.
Only I problem I had was one of the drives was not working out of the box so I couldn’t configure the RAID. Whilst talking to WD support in the evening I realised the drive had simply come loose during shipping and all was well.
This could have been a bigger deal if I hadn’t been technical proficient enough to open the case and re-seat the drive.
This deals with those things very smoothly. A solid leap in performance from my old 7 year old device. The user experience is well laid out but no an on board operating system like other manufacturers. It’s more like what you get from a Wifi Router. Still, lots of easy to configure options with a reasonable amount of depth.
Ultimately, it was VERY easy to get up and running to setup shares, be able to stream to TV’s, and also manage the device and content remotely over the web. I quite love that I can set my Iphone (8) up with the WD software to automatically push photo’s and videos to a share, then manage the content directly on the NAS, rather than going via PC. The EX2 Ultra will also Email me alerts on issues or log changes.
Power management is interesting. You can set a schedule for up and downtime, but there is no power button, so if you want to access it when you’ve scheduled it to be off, you need to pull the power cable and reinsert. I might be missing a deep sleep wake on lan option, but don’t think so. Ultimately I guess this keeps the price down, and with disk sleep it probably is OK to leave on all the time. Just doesn’t quite fit with a green message.
Disk loading (compared to my old device) is also nice and simple. Spring loaded lid, unscrew the clamp, push disk in. Super.
I bought this as a media server for the home when it was discounted at a price that was too good to turn down. As a back up to cease reliance on a cloud based solution it works well. The software is limited however, PLEX is easy to load and works well for content saved on the hard drive however live tv does not work well as the server is not really powerful enough to manage it without regular buffering. The WD support team have been reasonably helpful but probably I have expected too much for what is a very reasonably priced solution. For a basic NAS server this is excellent value and compares well with others at almost double the price and is very easy to set up for a novice.
best thing i ever bought saved me money on drives,backs up all 5 of my computers and all of my phones and i can login and grab my files or stream my videos from anywhere in the world.
I wanted to upgrade from a single drive My Cloud to to X2 Ultra so that I could take advantage of having the drive in the original My Cloud and a WD external desk model. It was easy to set up and very easy to format the drives using the online interface. I also wanted to run Plex as it was available as an app on my smart TV, but not an option on the lower spec My Cloud drive I already had. The drive was seen immediately on the network and the contents loaded into the Plex library. The drive does occasionally drop off the network, but a cold reboot usually sorts this out, I am able to stream videos and music remotely on my phone using the My Cloud app for Android.
This unit is slow to add data to but is super quick to access and stream data and media and that’s the most important detail, Who wants data stream’s that suffer with lags.
OK so it took a full day to load my 1.6 Tb of music to the drive (I was not impressed by that) .
So when all was in place I started my Marantz music Streamer/Amp and connected with ease and started playing my tunes… Perfect no lag… no loss of quality it was and is doing the job it was brought for with ease.
So although I have a dedicated NAS just for films and TV series I chucked a few movies on to it on a share with remote access and asked a few friends and family to log in and view them with as many devices as possible and let me know how things went.
Only one person could not connect but only because they were on a university network,
Connections were made from behind VPN’s using smart TV’s mobile phones/tablets and laptops and base PC’s.
All reported that they had enjoyed perfect playback with no lag or sound drop and of the highest picture resolution
Smart TV’s will when on a slow network auto adjust the playback quality to avoid lags all had 4K straight down the pipe and on screen.
I am aware that because I have the highest speed fibre that I have an advantage over standard broadband connections but I think this would have a only have a negligible effect on overall performance when accessing via remote access.
So my view is that although its a pain putting large blocks of data on to it at the start once setup is complete it is a superb piece of kit and well worth the money.
Be aware that after the initial set up e-mails for confirmation (required) WD will start to send you marketing e-mails (never saw a box to opt out) but just open the mail and click unsubscribe at the bottom and they stop.
All I want is a place to dump files and stream media through Plex. This does a great job for both. All of my video has been tweaked to avoid transcoding so this can stream 4K totally smoothly.
File transfers average about 25-35 MB/s on my local network over wifi. Temperatures seem pretty high to me averaging around 50c but this seems to be the norm.
It’s pretty vocal occasionally, often the loudest thing in the room. If this was on my desk and worked hard it would probably drive me batty eventually. Most of the time it’s silent though.
Overall I’m very pleased with it.
Having previous experience setting up a Mycloud device, this one was easy to set up for me although it isn’t always easy if the installer doesn’t have much experience with these WD items. It’s knowing what to set up within the device software options and how to do so that is half the battle.
Once it is set up it though which took me around 4 hours including moving over 100GBytes of data from the old drive to this one, it works a treat and the Android App means my phones images are automatically uploaded to my Nas as a backup which is a nice useful feature.
This EX2 ultra version has a more powerful processor compared to the older versions which include the single drive Mycloud and mirror devices and more memory too which helps speed up response and makes interacting with the device much better. With less memory and the slower processor things could grind to a halt at times with older models.
I tend to opt for static IP (ARP) with fixed devices like this and it was very easy to set this one up uising the same address as my previous device. This saved me having to reconfigure my security camera nas storage settings.
If you are looking for a reliable relatively easy to use Nas drive for media streaming and one or two 1080P security cameras perhaps, this is ideal.
It works very well. Very good small server. It is not difficult to configure and fast. It does not play 4K videos in Plex mode. But it’s a very good cloud storage. Easy to use. That’s it.
Fantastic product for anyone wanting a fast simple NAS solution, works straight out of box, just follow the easy set up instructionsand youll be up and running in no time.
Wanted a NAS for ages but always a little expensive for what I wanted. I ‘needed’ all the bells and whistles like iSCSI so therefore I need the Ultra version of the EX2. I also didn’t want to be limited by the single drive bay systems.
The hardware is great, looks clean and professional, blends in perfectly on a computer desk or just about anywhere in the home. I’ve always used WD hard drives and I trust them 100% and to this day [touch wood] I’ve never had a problem with any I have had over the years.
The software UI is great and really easy to use, anything you don’t understand is clearly explained and that goes for each feature and how to use them. So easy I think my girlfriend could set one up.
With the MyCloud software you can easily set up RAID, partitions, iSCSI, user profiles etc.
For example I have my NAS drives in RAID 0 configuration for performance (I can always back up to another NAS in future for safety) and using the full 4TB of hard drive storage. I have created partitions for movies and documents to be separated, I have an iSCSI partition for a large portion of my game library (yes you can actually run games from an iSCSI partition with this NAS, even though I could never find evidence of this anywhere on the internet and when I have asked multiple NAS drive manufacturers if it’s possible none of them ever had an answer) just bare in mind that most games will load slower than normal but isn’t a huge deal unless playing online multiplayer.
I have created a profile for both myself and my girlfriend who also has her entire Mac backed up to her portion of the NAS, separate from mine and something I cannot see/interfere with [unless I really wanted to go into the settings and allow myself to do that].
The MyCloud NAS drives are so aptly named due to the fact you can create your own cloud storage service. So as well as accessing your files within your home over WiFi or ethernet you can enable cloud access, you create a login profile for yourself and anyone else using the storage and WHAM you can view/open/edit everything on your phone on the iOS/Android app or on the web from any computer.
This review has been quickly written as I am tired and not in much of a mood for writing extensively so when I find time in future I will update this for a more in-depth analysis.
This is my second network attached drive from this manufacturer. Both products are well made and work a treat, really quiet in use. Great peace of mind knowing that you are able to upload your files at any time with the added benefit of RAID to give further reassurance
I am using this as a time machine back up and it works absolutely perfectly. Also using it as a dlna sever. WDs built in server works well.
The only problem I have had with it is when using the PLEX software. PLEX asks to download an upgrade but it keeps failing to install. (I ended up just not using PLEX as I realised it doesn’t do what I wanted it for anyway). Other than that I found the operating system very user friendly..
However, once you map the drive onto your network you are also able to map the USB drive as well and transfer it through Windows Explorer which works extremely well (provided you are connecting via a LAN cable and not over wifi or that takes forever)
All in all, it does what it’s supposed to do. It’s completely let down by the built in management software for backups.
The WD Sync app is very simple. I just accepted the default settings (My Docs, My pics, My videos and MyMusic). It then took about 2 hours to copy 160 GB from my PC to the NAS via gigabit ethernet (everything in my house is ethernet except my tablet and phone). I then tried the WD Sync app with a few trial files and it is simple. Create a document in My Docs on your PC and it immediately appears on the NAS.
I purchased this NAS mainly for storing my photos which are rapidly filling up my 500 GB SSD on my PC – every time I press the shutter button on my camera, there goes anything from 20+ MB to 50+ MB depending on how I have set my camera. It was very easy to map a network drive to the Photos folder on the NAS, so I cn now use my NAS as a fancy external HD. I now store my photos on the NAS thus by-passing my PC completely.
If this NAS had better instructions in the packaging and on the WD website, it would get five stars. I found out how poor the documentation is when I tried to set up the NAS as a DLNA media server. After a bit of searching on the WD website, I gave up and tried to muddle through on my own.
I got the NAS set up as a DLNA server, but my TV still would not recognise it on the network. After a bit of searching on Google and YouTube, I realised that I had to set up a Windows Homegroup first. Once I did that, my TV recognised the NAS and I can now use my TV to view photos, play music and vatch videos that are stored on the NAS.
But setting up the software on a client computer is a real pain. The quick setup instructions are minimal, and point to a website that doesn’t seem to do anything. Once you get to it, there is a moderately useful control panel – you may have to go to the IP address directly to find it (once you have found the IP address from the router). On one computer the device could be seen on the network immediately, on another it managed to hide itself for a few hours until I forced it to work. Setting up access from an Iphone using the MyCloud app was easy. The support website is OK, but links are not easily seen – so it is easy to get very frustrated trying to find things.
However once I set it up, backup of two laptops to the device (over WiFi) took only a couple of hours. It works well with the Windows 10 File History function giving hourly file backups – once you have been able to map a drive.
**** Update*****
I loaded WD Sync, the associated MyCloud software which claims to allow several machines to work off a single NAS folder structure. After 3 days, it is still syncing, and as MS Outlook now puts mail files in the main folders, it constantly loops around these – but cannot sync them anyway as they are locked by Outlook. So WD Sync has now sunk. It is probably useful for a simple set of folders, but it seems not possible to exclude specific files types (such as outlook pst files). So avoid.