Western Digital goes all out for performance with their Pro Series PR2100
Western Digital's NAS solutions have been getting progressively better since it entered this sector and gradually polarised its range into home and business-oriented solutions. The new My Cloud Pro Series builds on previous designs by delivering more compact and refined offerings, in the form of the four-bay PR4100 and dual drive PR2100 reviewed here. The review system came with two of the latest WD RED 8TB drives pre-installed, though you can buy this unit with smaller capacities or as a bare system if you don't need the 16TB of potential drive space on offer.
By default, that's configured in mirrored redundant drive mode with an 8TB capacity, but you could easily reconfigure that to give you the full 16TB if you don't mind the possibility of it all disappearing if one drive fails.
This hardware is about more than a massive storage potential, though, something I realised when I got to peruse the specification sheet. Built around Intel's Pentium N3710 processor, it features 4GB of DDR3 memory and has a hardware video transcoding engine optimised for Plex. While that's great and makes this a sparkling home media server, I'm not sure business users will see the same value in the video transcoding capabilities. They're more likely to be enticed by the dual Ethernet ports and dual power supply options. As expected the dual gigabit link can be channel bonded with a suitable hub to deliver very high levels of performance to multiple users simultaneously.
In a single user test, I achieved a sustained 114MB/S, which is close to what you can realistically get out of a single gigabit Ethernet port.
Availability is also enhanced with the ability to use two external DC power packs, although only one is provided in the box. Those also wanting to hand external drives off the PR2100 can do so through the two USB 3.0 ports available. There is one at the rear and another on the front, that's associated with the control for copying the contents of an external device over to the internal drives. That's great for anyone doing photography or video work, as they can plug in and dump their work onto the network with a single push of a button.
On the whole, I have no issues with the hardware here. It's powerful and yet remarkably compact, and the WD designers have resisted the temptation of making it look like a faux book. The weakness of this product range, however, is that My Cloud OS just doesn't seem to be evolving rapidly enough to keep up with this super-competitive market sector. I first saw this interface about three years ago and, while it's embrace of Cloud services have extended, in other respects it hasn't progressed in one critical area.
Where Synology has 101 apps, this system offers you just 17 to add to the four that come pre-installed. There are some useful ones, like Acronis Truelmage, Joomla and WordPress, but the growth to get this limited selection has been glacial. Therefore, if you want apps then look elsewhere - unless the specific ones that have been added so far are the exact ones you need.
For more general use the PR2100 is better specified as it has most of the features that anyone wanting to deploy a small office server might appreciate. That includes iSCSI, volume virtualisation, DLNA, Apple Time Machine, Cloud Backups (ElephantDrive and Amazon S3), plus the usual suspects of FTP and SNMP. You can also install WD apps on your phone or tablet that allow you to access contents on the server even when you're working away from the office, conveniently. This all works rather well, and it's relatively easy to deploy and control on either a group or individual basis.
That just leave the price to discuss. With two 8TB drives installed in this unit, it was never going to be what you'd consider a steal. That said, the WD Red 8TB drives (WD80EFZX) in this unit cost £339 each and the bare PR2100 unit is £380, so buying one with the drives pre-installed could save you £159. However, according to prices provided by Western Digital, the best value is the 12TB model where the saving is £218, though it's true of most of the capacities on offer. Personally, as prices fluctuate between suppliers, I'd do my own enquiries and calculations before investing, just to get the best deal.
My view of the WD My Cloud Pro range remains much the same after spending time with this iteration as it was after encountering it previously. The hardware is excellent, but the software side of the equation still needs some work and badly needs to attract more third party applications to supplement the few WD have managed to entice so far. Mark Pickavance
A powerful NAS box with plenty of capacity pre-installed.