WD today announced a four-bay addition to its My Cloud NAS family.
The My Cloud EX4 is a four-bay version of WD’s popular My Cloud "personal cloud" NAS. The hardware platform is based on a 2 GHz Marvell "Kirkwood" 88F8262 processor with 512 MB of RAM. Dual Gigabit Ethernet and power ports provide redundant LAN and power connections and dual USB 3.0 ports allow for attached backup and storage expansion.
Four hot-swappable bays come loaded with 2, 3 or 4 TB WD Red 3.5" drives configurable in RAID 0,1,5 5+ hot spare and 10 or JBOD. Or buyers can provide their own drives by choosing the diskless model. Also supported are online RAID level migration, disk and array roaming and Flex-RAID.
WD My Cloud EX4
The EX4 shares many features with its single-bay sibling, including a redesigned configuration dashboard and Twonky 7 DLNA and iTunes servers. Additional servers include FTP, backup and P2P download.
The same reworked My Cloud iOS and Android apps also provide and improved remote experience including smarter photo thumbnail generation and easy file transfer between My Cloud and Dropbox, SkyDrive and Google Drive accounts.
Backup options include bundled WD Smartware Pro backup software for Windows client backup and Time Machine support for MacOS users. The EX4 itself can be backed up drive-to-drive internally, to attached USB drives, to other networked My Cloud EX4s, or to cloud services such as Amazon S3 and ElephantDrive. Standard rsync is not supported via the admin GUI, but requires cofiguration via the supported SSH access option.
A key differentiation from the single-bay My Cloud is the EX4’s support for third-party add-ins. The initial group includes aMule, Icecast, Joomla!, WordPress, phpBB, phpMyAdmin and Logitech SqueezeCenter. WD also is making an SDK available for developers.
Other features unique to the EX4 include Active Directory, DFS and iSCSI target support and volume encryption.
The My Cloud EX4 is covered by a two-year warranty and is shipping now from WD’s online store and will be generally available shortly. U.S. MSRPs are $379.99 USD for the drive-less My Cloud EX4, $799.99 USD for 8 TB, $949.99 USD for 12 TB and $1,149.99 USD for 16 TB.