Assessment
The WD My Cloud 3 TBs Dashboard, CIFS/Samba, and streaming features worked as designed with FreeBSD 11, Linux, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, Kodi, and Windows 10 Mobile. Although FTP support is available, its unnecessary with any of the aforementioned platforms. The SSH option, however, is invaluable if you own the WD My Cloud with the 02.xx.xx firmware, since its one of the few options for powering down the device remotely.
The WD My Cloud certainly isnt perfect, but it should be enough for typical consumers. Users who have worked with NAS from Synology or QNAP, or built their own with FreeNAS, Linux, or NAS4Free will probably nitpick due to the products lack of flexibility or limited features.
Other considerations during usage are the following:
1. Remember that if you are running a VPN on either your router, mobile device, or laptop, by default you wont be able to access the WD My Cloud for obvious reasons. If youre using a VPN app, simply just disable it when you need access to the My Cloud. ExpressVPN, for example, will render the Android, iOS, or Linux client invisible to the My Cloud. Make necessary changes to your LAN IP addressing or individual client if this is an issue. WD Photos and the WD My Cloud apps will not work if you have VPN running on your mobile device, although cached images will appear.
2. Registering the My Cloud and registering to the mycloud.com service can be an issue. Refer to Quick Fix: Registering for WD My Cloud for additional details.
3. The WD My Cloud 3 TB has no power button and depending on your firmware, powering down the device safely can be an issue. As with most hardware running on an operating system, its not recommended to unplug the product without shutting down the product properly. Refer to Powering off My Cloud (02.xx.xx).
4. Although it can be purely a one-off incident, my TrueOS/FreeBSD 11 machine was able to access folder shares without undergoing authentication.
Note: Im in the process of verifying this anomaly on a FreeBSD 11 standalone machine.
5. The speed of transfers and the ability of the client to index the My Clouds considerable storage is dependent on your router and your client device. As with most LAN-related products, your router and Wi-Fi setup determines your overall user experience when it comes to downloading files and streaming media from the My cloud.
Among my client devices, Windows 10 on the HP Stream 8 tablet was the worst at detecting the My Cloud. VLC for Android and Windows 10 notably suffer thanks to the Stream 8s awful Wi-Fi chip. The Sony Xperia C3 and iPad 2 with the WD My Cloud app were the fastest at detecting the shares (though WD Photos on the iPad 2 struggled with indexing thousands of photos). Surprisingly, Metro File Manager for Windows 10 Mobile and Windows Phone 8.1 also had no problems connecting immediately.
6. You can connect an external USB hard drive to the USB port of the My Cloud. Once connected, the external hard drive receives the same access policy as th e WD My Cloud shares. If you are migrating data from an external hard drive, connecting to the USB 3.0 port is the fastest way to transfer files. Although a USB 3.0 port may not seem like much by todays standards, its still a reliable alternative to connecting an external drive to a Linux, macOS, Windows, or BSD client, and then initiating transfer over SMB/CIFS.
I connected an old 2TB Seagate Desktop Expansion drive to the WD My Cloud 3 TBs USB drive and was quickly able to transfer a ripped 4.4 GB .m4v file in less than 2 minutes, even with the My Cloud serving media to my Sony Xperia C3 and iPad 2.
Note: Unfortunately, although My Cloud runs on a Linux kernel, support for ext4/ext3 formatted drives is unreliable with file transfer speeds slowing to a crawl compared with NTFS or FAT formatted storage. The My Cloud was able to detect an ext4 hard drive in a USB 2.x enclosure, but f ile transfer was pretty slow up to the point connecting the ext4 hard drive to a Linux PC on the network was preferable.
7. Even with only one user configured for authentication (admin), macOS Finder can be pretty persistent about prompting for username and password for shares. If youre accessing the My Cloud using macOS, you will find yourself inputting the user or admin password regularly, more so than in Windows 10, Linux, FreeBSD, or Android/iOS mobile app clients. On the other hand, macOS on a Macbook Air equipped with an adapter is the fastest when it comes to transferring files over Ethernet to the My Cloud. TrueOS/FreeBSD on a Zotac ZBOX Nano with a Gigabit Ethernet card is surprisingly the slowest.
8. If you installed the WD My Cloud app on your Android device, you wont need a separate file manager since the app provides copy, paste, and delete options for the internal memory, micro SD card, and the networked WD My Cloud product. Although you can choose to use a third-party file manager such as File Commander, the My Cloud app also saves you the trouble of authentication or configuring the IP address if the My Clouds IP address changes.
9. Although media streaming from the My Cloud is seamless and works with clients such as iTunes, Windows Media Player 12, XpressPlayer Pro (iOS), and Sony Music/Video/Album apps, file format support can still be an issue if your media was encoded using various legacy codecs and containers. If this happens, just access the file using CIFS/Samba a nd open the file using a dedicated app such as VLC or SMPlayer.
10. Users who have recently updated to the latest iTunes may find themselves unable to playback media from the My Cloud shares. My Cloud is still detected and indexed files will appear in iTunes but none of the supported file formats will play. If this happens, check that macOS is authenticated to the share and the shares are mounted. If you still cant playback media using iTunes, reinstall iTunes.
No comments:
Post a Comment