Western Digital WD My Cloud Home Duo WDBMUT0080JWT-BESN 8TB Network Attached Storage (White)

Good product… only drawback is can not be connected to the PC directly as external hard drive. Lan and USB import is only option.

I bought this product about 2 months ago and satisfied with it’s performance. It serves the purpose of NAS drive for home use. This however isn’t good fit as commercial NAS drive.

Overall this is a good product but there are few Cons that one should note before buying this product.

Proving feedback on on following parameters:

1. Installation and Configuration
Pros:
– Very easy to install the hard-disk and configure it.
Cons:
– You can configure auto backup from various devices. However, you can’t customize the location or the folder names where each device would copy the content. This is really annoying as the folders with weird name are created on root (‘Z’) directly and since you can’t customize the names, it is difficult to find out which folder is for which device.

2. Ease of access
Pros:
– Once configured, it is accessible from anywhere in the world.
Cons:
– The content can only be access once you start the WD software on desktop / laptop. The drive get’s attached as ‘Z’ drive in Windows and network mount in Linux & iOS. If you exit the software, the ‘Z’ drive gets disconnected.
– In mobile devices (including iPads & Tabs), the content is accessible only via WD software. It is overall good software but lacks some features. The WD software allows you to access all files stored in WD hard-disk, but it will only let you upload videos and images back to hard-disk. There is no way (direct or indirect) to upload the content back to this hard-disk. The only (crud) way that I found is to access the public folder using any network drive software and copy / paste from desktop, access the public folder as network drive (in explorer) and move the file to ‘Z’ drive. This is a serious limitatoin of software.
– When your internet is down, you can’t access the hard-disk. Even though your router is on and all devices are in local network, the hard-disk isn’t accessible.

3. Read / Write Speed
Pros:
– Read and Write speed is fairly good. The speed depends on your router speed and hard-disk both and hence difficult to determine which one is slow but I am getting on an average 25 to 30 MBps speed.

4. Noise
Pros:
– I read complain in some of the review that this is noisy hard-disk (due to it’s fan). I haven’t observed any noise and can say, this is fairly quiet product.

5. Security
Pros:
– Fairly secure as you need WD software with username and password to access the content.
– No other user on the same wifi network can access the content without it’s software and username & password. They can however, access Public folder without needing any username & password.

6. Backup
Pros:
– It supports both RAID 0 & RAID 1 config. This is really good feature as you can switch between the two. Space would vary based on config.
– Auto sync works very well. You can configure auto-back up in your mobile device and it copies all your photos and videos to this hard-disk. This feature works from any location and you don’t have to be on same wifi network.

7. Internal hard-disk replacability
Pros:
– Hard-disks are replaceable (but only WD HDD is supported). It is very easy to replace internal hard-disk.

8. Multi-user support
Pros:
– Support for multiple user to access the hard-disk. Each user have their space to manage files.
Cons:
– There is no concept of common/shared content which can be accessed by all logged in users. You have facility to create shared link which can be used for sharing the content.

9. Others
Pros:
– Capability to make folder available offline

The primary reason of giving this product 4 star is due to it’s poor software. WD should seriously work on this software as there are many software limitations and not hardware limitations.

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Update after using it for 1 year:
I reduced one star after using it for 1 year. The reason is, there is auto firmware upgrade that was forced by WD on this device and after this the harddisk started behaving weird. It allows access of all old data but if we copy new content to it, it disappears after few hours (sometimes 1 day). It is as if, the snapshot of data is restored to original state. After contacting WD support, they says this is their internal “db” issue that they can’t fix. For this, I have to take backup of all the data (seriously?) to another drive, reset the hard drive and use it.

I have requested them to replace this “Faulty” product. Waiting for their response.

I bought the Home Duo to replace my 9 year old My Cloud 2TB that was starting to show signs of finally giving up. Overall, I am very unhappy with my purchase and here’s why:
– The unit they shipped me is on an ancient firmware version and just doesn’t upgrade. To make matters worse, WD only supports auto OTA upgrades which simply doesn’t work. Here is the best part – I am supposed to hook up the device to another network to trigger the upgrade. I guess I am supposed to take it to my neighbor’s each time there’s a software upgrade
– No direct access. Cant connect to the it from my Mac, PC or Smart TV. This was my main access method with the old unit. So you are stuck with using their web app for any and all operation