Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who has the most personable cloud of them all?
Unboxing the Western Digital My Cloud Mirror (Gen 2), I experienced a degree of déjà vu, because it’s structurally identical to its previous My Cloud Mirror and My Cloud RE2 designs.
While the curved chassis is undoubtedly the same, what I was curious to discover was how much computing platform they also share. The first generation My Cloud Mirror had a single-core 1.2GHz CPU, whereas this has a modestly superior dual-core 1.3GHz Marvel ARMADA 385. With more processing power comes more possibilities, surely, and hopefully more features.
How this and its younger brother differs from the RE2 is that it supports SNMP, DFS, Active Directory, iSCSI and Volume Encryption, because it's made for business users, and the My Cloud Mirror isn’t.
The focus here is the home user who wants to secure his personal data in a way that doesn’t rely on Google, Microsoft or Dropbox, to name but a few cloud providers.
If you want to take responsibility for your own data, then it’s probably a good idea to properly secure it against hardware failure, and the ‘Mirror’ in this title refers to the drive mirroring that the system inherently promotes.
You can use the two internal drives in a striped mode, giving you double the space and twice the chance of losing it all, but that isn’t how the My Cloud Mirror was meant to operate.
The review model came with dual 2TB WD Red drives, but you can buy it with 2x 3TB and 2x 4TB if you need the extra capacity. What’s important to realise is that the mirroring only gives you half the labelled capacity, so the 4TB review model only has 2TB of space. Critically, though, it will continue to secure your data if one of the drives dies.
This is certainly an improvement over the singledrive My Cloud, but you do pay for that privilege.
The 2TB version of single drive My Cloud is £99.93, and if you buy two of them they’ll give you the same capacity, and you’re covered not only for drive failure, but also one of the boxes dying entirely.
And you could even place each one in a different physical location and possibly sync them across the internet. And you can get that for £50 less than a single My Cloud Mirror 4TB would cost you.
However, the Mirror does have a few tricks up its drive slots that swing the balance back a little in its favour. In addition to having a more powerful CPU, it also supports FTP, a server backup model and a P2P BitTorrent client.
That this hardware has installable apps is probably one of its strongest features, if only Western Digital could be convinced to release more. Above the ones pre-installed, there are just 11 listed – a tiny fraction of what Synology offers on its NAS platform.
Why there aren’t more is possibly down to how technically minded you need to be to configure some of the ones provided, because these are in stark contrast to the generally home-user-friendly nature of the My Cloud OS3 interface and feature set.
What it doesn’t lack are the USB 3.0 ports. It has two, so you can hang more external storage off it.
But easily the best reason for going with the Mirror is the speed, because even in RAID 1 configuration, this is an exceptionally punchy performer. Depending on the size of file being accessed, I recorded speeds on a gigabit LAN of greater than 100MB/s for both reading and writing. If no other reason convinces you that this is a better choice than the single drive My Cloud, then that should be it.
As with the other My Cloud devices, you get a complementary three-user licence for WD SmartWare Pro, and you can also use it with Apple Time Machine.
Undoubtedly the best utility is WD Sync, which allows you live backup selected folders on multiple PCs to the My Cloud Mirror. There are also mobile apps to sync phone and tablet data to the unit.
My only real complaints from a software perspective are that even with two USB ports, Western Digital couldn’t allow one to be used to share a printer or support a USB wi-fi adapter.
In terms of value, I initially thought the 6TB model is probably the best deal. Then I calculated bare drives costs, and realised that the hardware costs least with 2TB drives; the 4TB is next and 3TB drives are the least economic.
How practical an alternative this is the likes of Google’s Cloud services entirely depends on how you currently use it. But for some this could provide not only a rapid local NAS solution but a means to synchronise files over a wide range of devices and geographic locations. Mark Pickavance
A fast NAS box with inherent drive redundancy.