WD Wants You To Have Your Own Personal Cloud With The My Cloud Platform
Western Digital is expanding its vision for personal storage from beyond traditional internal and external hard drives, and it has something to do with cloud storage and a platform called “My Cloud”.
Cloud storage is all the rage, and the convenience of having your files backed up offsite is undeniable, but there’s always a concern about security, and sometimes file availability--though mostly rather immediate with a service such as Dropbox--can be a bit clunky. It’s also expensive.
The WD My Cloud platform removes the problem of worrying about vendor security and lock-in by giving you what boils down to your own file server that makes all your data available to you anytime and anywhere you have an Internet connection. And there are no monthly fees; you just pay for the storage device, which pretty much looks like any other WD external drive, and set it up easily with the included software. Indeed, unlike a traditional file server, this personal cloud is designed to be incredibly simple to manage, so any average user can handle it.
You can offload storage from essentially any device or PC to My Cloud with the desktop and mobile apps, and you can share and access those files using the web interface with any of your devices. In fact, it can function as a sort of streaming box with the WD Live media player, a smart TV, or a console. If you’re using other popular cloud storage services, you can actually integrate them to share files between them using My Cloud.
The My Cloud device has a dual-core processor and gigabit Ethernet connection for strong performance, and although it’s available in ample 2TB, 3TB, and (soon) 4TB capacities, if you need additional storage you can connect another external hard drive via a USB 3.0 port.
Coming in the future, you can opt for 2- and 4-drive My Cloud configurations, but for now WD is offering the 2TB and 3TB single-drive setups for $149.99 and $179.99, respectively. The 4TB version is coming in November for $249.99.
Cloud storage is all the rage, and the convenience of having your files backed up offsite is undeniable, but there’s always a concern about security, and sometimes file availability--though mostly rather immediate with a service such as Dropbox--can be a bit clunky. It’s also expensive.
The WD My Cloud platform removes the problem of worrying about vendor security and lock-in by giving you what boils down to your own file server that makes all your data available to you anytime and anywhere you have an Internet connection. And there are no monthly fees; you just pay for the storage device, which pretty much looks like any other WD external drive, and set it up easily with the included software. Indeed, unlike a traditional file server, this personal cloud is designed to be incredibly simple to manage, so any average user can handle it.
You can offload storage from essentially any device or PC to My Cloud with the desktop and mobile apps, and you can share and access those files using the web interface with any of your devices. In fact, it can function as a sort of streaming box with the WD Live media player, a smart TV, or a console. If you’re using other popular cloud storage services, you can actually integrate them to share files between them using My Cloud.
The My Cloud device has a dual-core processor and gigabit Ethernet connection for strong performance, and although it’s available in ample 2TB, 3TB, and (soon) 4TB capacities, if you need additional storage you can connect another external hard drive via a USB 3.0 port.
Coming in the future, you can opt for 2- and 4-drive My Cloud configurations, but for now WD is offering the 2TB and 3TB single-drive setups for $149.99 and $179.99, respectively. The 4TB version is coming in November for $249.99.
