Western Digital My Cloud EX4 8TB review

The EX4 8TB’s private cloud features are a major selling point, as it’s easy to get connected to the Western Digital My Cloud service. There are apps available for Windows, Android and iOS, and once they’re installed you can upload and download content to and from your NAS with ease. This is a particularly valuable feature if you have contractors, clients or staff that work off-site. If you’ve got a designer putting together some signage for you, for example, you can create a user account for them, choose the directories they can access and then email them a code so they can set up remote access. All that’s missing is a web access interface.

Unfortunately, although the My Cloud EX4 8TB makes it easy to share files and has an excellent interface, particularly for those who like to keep things simple, the EX4 4TB’s performance isn’t up to that of its rivals. In our standard SMB large file transfer test, the EX4 8TB produced a write speed of 45.9MB/s and a read of 49.7MB/s. In our much more challenging small file transfer test the Ex4 8TB produced a write speed of 6.2MB/s and a read speed of 13.6MB/s. In our iSCSI test, where a virtual drive is created on the NAS and mounted by a client PC as if it’s a local hard drive, the EX4 8TB produced an average large file transfer speed of 43.9MB/s and an average small file transfer speed of 31.5MB/s.

The EX4 8TB is pretty good value in terms of storage, as out works out to be just 7p per GB. The drives alone would cost a little over £300. The My Cloud EX4 8TB is cheap for a quad-bay NAS device, but if your business depends on fast data throughput we think an Atom-based NAS such as the Asustor AS-604T (http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/network-storage/1303258/asustor-as-604t) and a set of Western Digital Red disks would be a better buy. You’ll spend around £100 more but you’ll almost double your read and write speeds.