Mark looks at Western Digital new Expert Series NAS box and likes what he sees
No longer wholly satisfied with just making NAS-optimised hard drives, Western Digital has also been developing its own NAS boxes. Last year it produced a range of eguipment that included the single sealed unit devices like the My Cloud Personal Cloud Storage, and the more flexible EX2 and EX4 multi-drive boxes. Now it's come back to expand the 'Expert Series' range further with four new boxes, covering home and small business users who want a fire-and-forget small server technology.
The new My Cloud EX2100 is the bottom rung, but still a step up from the previous dual drive My Cloud EX2 that I raved about in this very magazine nine months ago. Externally this hardware has thrown off the Digital Book ethos, and instead it looks exactly as you might imagine a dual drive NAS box would appear. On the front are two easily accessible drive bays for 3.5" mechanisms, a power switch and a USB 3.0 port. Around the back is another high performance USB port, dual gigabit LAN ports (for aggregation), and a socket for the small external power block.
It's powered by an ARM based Marvell Armada 385, has 1GB of RAM and (depending how you purchase it) can come either as drive-less or with 2x 2TB (4TB), 2x 4TB (8TB) or 2x 6TB (12TB). The 8TB review model came preinstalled with the My Cloud OS, two WD Red 4TB drives configured in mirror mode, and was ready for deployment right out of the box.
The My Cloud OS is deceptively simple, but has most of the critical features that most NAS box owners are looking for. That includes DLNA, Mac Time Machine, FTP access, active directory, ITunes server and a P2P client.
It supports users and groups, and you can even allow them to access the shared files remotely. One curiosity is that the initial user is 'Admin' and, while you can rename this user, it is only one empowered with admin rights. You can't bless other users with these powers or the enhanced interface that the admin user gets.
Extensions to the core facilities come in the form of apps, of which there are relatively few at this time, but more are promised. They currently include Joomla, IceCast, aMule, phpBB, phpMyAdmin, SgueezeCenter, WordPress, Transmission and Dropbox - which is also inherently supported as a backup target.
That's not many compared to what some other platforms can claim, but it is a start and Western Digital's software team is apparently working hard to expand the selection. Indeed, it's already done some sterling work in respect of the 'Volume virtualisation', as the EX2100 supports the splicing of multiple iSCSI sources to create a seamless expansion path.
That means that if you fill up your EX2100 and want to add another or an EX4100, the My Cloud OS allows you organise shares using an iSCSI virtual volume, binding the new hardware in to support subfolders without the connected users even being aware of the changes to the hardware they're accessing. Those in small business IT support will love this feature.
When I covered the EX2 I remarked on its impressive turn of speed, but compared to the EX2100 it looks positively pedestrian. All the testing I did was with the drives in Mirror mode, which isn't generally the best way to optimise performance. However, it still managed reading and writing at 115MB/S over a single Gigabit Ethernet line. Using dual line aggregation it is probably faster or rather it would be if you added up the performance experienced by multiple simultaneous users. That's really good news for the EX2100 when the apps become more prolific, because there is probably enough power in here to drive these services without negatively impacting on file serving performance.
Compared with some other dual drive NAS boxes, the EX2100 might seem a little on the expensive side, especially once you've populated it. The performance levels for a dual drive box are exceptional, and the My Cloud OS is both easy to follow and configure. There is only one critical element missing in this technological vista, a personal cloud application. At the launch of new hardware I talked with senior Western Digital people and was reassured that a killer 'sync' application was in the pipeline that would deliver the sort of experience that those who use Synology eguipment have come to rely.
Once that critical piece of the jigsaw is in place, the EX2100 can become what we all want; a true Cloud Service that isn't reliant on the grace of Google, Microsoft or Dropbox. If Western Digital can deliver this as promised, the EX2100 will transform from being a top-notch miniature file server to something even more desirable. With the EX2100, how seriously I take Western Digital's NAS box ambitions has been significantly elevated. Mark Pickavance
A fantastically fast and elegant dual drive NAS.