WD My Cloud EX2100 Dual Bay 8TB NAS Review

The WD My Cloud EX2100 is a new prosumer-oriented NAS drive from WD that continues the company's adventures in the realm of "personal cloud" storage. These drives are aimed directly at people who use Cloud storage such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Box.com, and others. The marketing speak from WD is that those services require a monthly payment for a small amount of storage, and you have to store your data on someone else's cloud. For example Dropbox charges $10 a month for 1TB of storage, and Google charges the same. WD's pitch is you can get multiple terabytes of storage with one of its drives, and use it as your own personal cloud storage, with the files accessible from any location with an internet connection, without a monthly or annual fee. It's a compelling argument, and one that we think has a lot of merit as long as you have some redundancy built into your setup.

Over the years WD has expanded its My Cloud offerings from simple one-drive units like the original My Cloud to the updated two-drive EX2 unit that straddled the line between professional NAS drive and home user box. The all-new EX2100 model we are looking at here is an upgrade from the EX2 in that it sits at the very top of its home user product stack, along with the four-drive version named the EX4100. It is an upgrade from the EX2 in that it offers improved performance, a few more features such as dual Ethernet and a quick-copy USB 3.0 button, and a more business-oriented design. It runs a custom Linux OS named appropriately, "My Cloud," and has a built-in dual-core CPU and 1GB of RAM.

This particular model is available in capacities including 4TB, 8TB, 12TB, and 0TB if you want to add your own drives. The model we are reviewing is an “8TB” model and includes two 4TB WD Red drives in RAID 1 by default. It is for sale on Amazon and WD's website for $559 as of press time, while the empty unit sells for $249.

WD My Cloud EX2100 Specifications & Features

Two primary features of the EX2100 is easy setup and maintenance -- think "NAS for noobies." The hard drives come pre-configured and its software has an intuitive browser-based interface that even the most uneducated home user could figure out. It’s basically a NAS drive for people who are afraid of the word NAS, but with advanced features and a higher level of performance you won't find on home-user based NAS systems.