back to article WD My Cloud EX4 four-bay NAS

WD is on a mission to make using NAS as easy as possible for consumers to use, from setting a unit up to accessing it remotely via a personal cloud. It’s not exactly a new mission, yet it has gained momentum since the company introduced its popular single bay My Cloud range. Now to get over the limitations of using just a single …

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    1. jason 7

      Re: Comparison with "real" servers

      This is it. A lot of small businesses work from home. Their office is in the spare room or in an extension if they are lucky. Often its not more than a cupboard. They do not want another PC/Server running burning up power when a simple 2 drive NAS box in RAID 1 can quietly hum along sipping 25w.

      Only does simple file sharing? Erm that's all a lot of people need, a central place to store files on that are accessible to all the PCs and a place to do daily PC/laptop backups to. Works a lot better than when they had all the files on Sharon's PC and it ground to a halt every 5 minutes from sharing.

      DLNA? Torrent Clients? iTunes server? Not important.

      These are usually people that have just worked out what a USB stick is. Yes it is that raw out there.

      It's all about simple progression as businesses grow and IT confidence grows along side it.

    2. CAPS LOCK

      Re: Comparison with "real" servers

      Linux (etc) might not work out-of-the-box as a NAS, but there are many preconfigured solutions that do. Best known are FreeNas and its fork Nas4Free. Try them out, you might be pleasantly surprised.

      1. jason 7

        Re: Comparison with "real" servers

        I've tried them and whilst very wonderful and flexible they still don't fit as a solution for reasons I've mentioned in other posts.

        Sometimes less is more.

  1. johnnymotel

    OK, help wanted here

    I have a very nice 5 bay storage box from Lian Li, it has a very basic PCB in the back to control the RAID. There is just enough space to fit a NUC board from Intel. But I'm stuck on how to connect up all five drives or maybe just four + one. I thought the NUC boards would make a good platform for FreeNas installation. The boards have a PCI Express connector, but cannot find any boards that would be similar to a regular PCI-E board with an SAS connector going to four drives.

    Any help anyone? Or any other suggestions instead of the Intel boards?

  2. Infernoz Bronze badge
    Meh

    Expensive, and dated RAID support, like most off-the-shelf NAS.

    I could buy most, if not all, the hardware for a /much/ faster and more secure FreeNAS 9.2.0 (best avoid 9.2.1!) box for £320, and support a lot more drives!

  3. Aaron 10

    The read/write speed isn't much faster than my first-gen Drobo on USB 2.0. What gives, WD?

  4. Hurn

    The ~ 50 MB/sec write speed is too slow. What's the bottleneck? The version of SMB/CIFS? Does it support NFS?

    Anytime a NAS box has 2 (or more) bridge / link / bond (pick your term) -able ethernet ports, the NAS is crying out for a benchmark while in bridged/linked/bonded mode.

    Also, any NAS which can operate in RAID 5 or 10 modes demands read/write benchmarks while in degraded mode - yank out a drive and benchmark in fault mode, then put the drive back in and benchmark during rebuild.

  5. ColinX

    Too slow for Consumer use I think but Reg didn't bother testing this!

    Most consumers buying 4 bay NAS with RAID do so because they have large storage requirements (>500GB), want redundancy, always on, and more importantly want to centrally stream media (video, music etc).

    For the market this is aimed at CPU and RAM are VERY important and seems VERY lowly speced. Personally for me to upgrade from my existing 2 bay I would want 1GB RAM.

    Shame REG just tested read and write speed, I don't really care about these I care about DLNA read speed as bulk read/write of files is something I rarely due being a consumer and not a IT dept.

  6. toughluck

    Abysmal performance

    What gives with just 45 MB/s performance sequential? With RAID 0, no less. A single drive is able to feed and digest 100 MB/s sequentially, with RAID 0, this should nearly linearly increase to 400 MB/s.

    Apparently this is a problem with all hardware solutions, I can see. I had a Linux soft raid solution with five 1 TB WD Green drives in a RAID 5 configuration and I was able to get up to nearly 500 MB/s from them. Now I switched to an LSI 9260-8i and the performance dropped at least 10 times, which is ridiculous, and I'm considering going back, despite the sunk costs.

    I can see the NAS boxes are even worse.

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