Wd 8tb My Cloud Ex2 Ultra Network Attached Storage Review
At a Glance
Expert'due south Rating
Pros
- Good overall performance
- Great streaming and backup features
- Very affordable without drives
Cons
- WD charges a lot for hard drives
- No power button.
Our Verdict
This super-affordable (without drives) dual-bay NAS box handles multimedia and backup with the all-time of them.
WD sells a lot of NAS boxes—products similar the My Deject EX2 Ultra are why. This box handles the streaming and backup basics with ataraxy, is easy to ready upwardly, nevertheless costs only $159 sans drives. It'due south i of the cheapest two-bay NAS boxes on the market place, but it's all the same very fast—that'due south a nice combination.
Design and functioning
WD could probably sell fifty-fifty more My Clouds if the company gave you a cost break on the bodily storage; populated versions of the EX2 Ultra retail for the same price as ownership i empty and populating it yourself with the same WD Ruby hard drives.
It'south like shooting fish in a barrel to add or swap iii.v-inch drives by popping open the latched peak, unscrewing a retaining clip, and sliding the drives in or out. But considering of the unusual way drives are mounted (with bearing-head screws that fit in slots at the peak of the trophy), installing 2.5-inch difficult drives or SSDs requires both an adapter tray and a SATA data/ability extension cable.
Jon Fifty. Jacobi The WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra deliverd solid performances on both our read and write benchmarks.
The EX2 Ultra features a Marvell Fleet 385 CPU and 1GB of memory. With two mirrored 4TB WD drives on board, those components powered the box to the 1 of the best throughput scores nosotros've seen, lagging but slightly behind Netgear's ReadyNAS 212—a product that costs twice as much. The fast throughput translated to very smooth 4K UHD (2160p) streaming and fast backups.
Interface and features
The EX2 Ultra's interface, the aforementioned one used on all the My Deject NAS boxes, is a clean, piece of cake-to-browse, tabbed matter. It'southward not as clever as the windows-in-a-browser featured by another boxes, but it tin can be navigated just equally speedily. There's besides a healthy drove of apps that includes IceCast, Dropbox, aMule, Joomla (content management), Transmission (for BitTorrent), and Z-way (for use with a Z-Wave IoT dongle).
Pre-installed utilities include simple P2P downloads, every bit well as HTTP and FTP backups. The latter allows fill-in to the EX2 Ultra from remote PCs and servers, which is absurd for backing up PCs without having to install a backup client. Besides available are a couple of pay-to-play titles: Acronis True Image backup and Milestone Arcus Surveillance. The box is easily accessed remotely without router configuration using WD'southward My Deject web portal.
Streaming options include an integrated DLNA server, Logitech media server (for Squeezebox clients), with the Plex server available for download. We had problems with Plex and its DLNA (on all NAS boxes), just WD's DLNA server works fine. Plex provides playback inside browsers, every bit well as on nearly every calculating device in the world via proprietary Plex clients. Those worked just fine.
Note: If you lot go the FTP route, set the Windows FTP server to relay Unix (not MS-DOS listings), or folder names won't announced on the EX2 Ultra. If that's Greek to yous (and you're not Greek), WD also provides client apps to sync your computers and devices to the box.
Deceptively simple, in that location'southward a lot of power backside the EX2 Ultra's interface.
The EX2 Ultra's extended characteristic set is slanted toward the business/corporate community. At that place's iSCSI and virtualization support, Active Directory linking, and remote .iso image mounting. If you're looking to stream around the office and provide storage for lots of users, the EX2 Ultra is a expert option that won't intermission the banking concern.
Conclusion
At $159 unpopulated, the EX2 Ultra is a heck of a bargain. Information technology'south not quite equally newbie-friendly as the Seagate Personal Cloud, just it's a much better performer, provides data redundancy (two drives), and the streaming and fill-in features are top-notch. It's just an fantabulous all-around NAS box.
Notation: The My Cloud Mirror is essentially the same product with fewer corporate features. Populated models are slightly cheaper than with the EX2 Ultra, but y'all can't buy ane unpopulated.
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Source: https://www.techhive.com/article/582594/wd-my-cloud-ex2-ultra-review-excellent-features-and-performance-at-a-very-nice-price.html