Today I was looking at consolidating some of my various Western Digital (WD) NAS devices so I picked up one of the WD MyCloud Home 8TB “NAS” at BestBuy. TL;DR It is not a NAS device in the sense of other NAS devices they previously sold, so if you are looking for SMB, NFS, etc, it won’t do it.
Full story: Thinking that I could consolidate a few 2TB WD Live and WD MyCloud Devices on to this one 8TB device I picked it up and another 8TB USB 3 drive to connect to it. (Previous incarnations of the WD MyCloud devices have a USB port on the back that you can use to either extend the storage or “mirror” the NAS drive to it for “backups”. So I did a quick check of the specs and the new WD MyCloud Home device had a USB port. But on the box it doesn’t say it is for coping files TO the device, not “mirroring” like the previous ones.
So I got home, unboxed the new 8TB MyCloud Home device and put the MAC address in my dhcp server (yes I do IT stuff for a job, so I have static reservations for specific devices.) Then plugged in the “NAS” and it powered on. The first thing I noticed was that when I went to the Web interface on it, it just printed up a JSON error, which I thought was weird. But since I hadn’t read any of the instructions that came with it, and there was not that much that did come with it. I tried a few other URL’s and all of them gave the same error. I then pulled out the little one piece instruction card and it said I had to go to WD’s web site to set the device up. Also after reading some more, it requires a connection to WD at all times. This was a BIG no-no for me. The previous devices never needed this so why now?
Well it seems that WD has completely re-branded their MyCloud line of products. The new “Home” brand requires that you have a 64-bit version of Windows or MacOS and you have to use their software to talk to the device. So gone are the days of doing a CIFS/SMB/NFS style mount of the disk from any operating system. By the time I read this I was getting pretty mad because I had just spend over $300 for a device that I assumed would operate like the previous incarnations of the MyCloud/Live devices. Well I quickly boxed it back up and took it back to BestBuy and asked for my money back which they did do.
So if you are wanting the device to act like the old ones, and be available via SMB or NFS, etc, you need to buy one that doesn’t have “Home” in the name or go with the “Pro” or Expert line supposedly. But I think from now on I will be looking at a different vendor. I understand they want to make it easy for non-technical people. But for those who know what they are doing, they should be able to interact with the device the way they want to.