WD 4TB My Cloud Personal Network Attached Storage - NAS - WDBCTL0040HWT-NESN

BLUF: If you want an affordable easy to use entry level NAS, this is for you.Let me start this by saying that the WD MyCloud 4TB is my first foray into NAS. I ordered the drive after reading one review, but then I grew extremely worried because I got to many of the other reviews of this product that were less than stellar. For me, it has been "so far, so good". The first thing I did was turn off sleep mode as recommended. I attached the drive to my router, hardwired my desktop to the router and downloaded the software and I was ready to transfer files in less than 5 minutes. Next I tested out the speed by transfering one show, around 200 MB, it transfered in about a minute. Then I transfered an entire season of shows, took about 9 minutes. Finally I transferred 1.5 TB of shows, it took about 24 hours. The speeds are to be expected being that it is all wireless, and I was somewhat impressed by them after reading what other people were dealing with. I went up to my TV and easily found the drive as visible and watched part of an episode to make sure it was good to go. Then I went to my wife's Surface Tablet and connected via that, easy. All said, I only have to worry about reliability which was the other major issue.Pro's:Good price for an entry level NASEasy to use/set upFast transfers, in my assessmentsUpgradeableCon's:Only comes in white (doesn't match my black gaming set up)Only one expansion USB 3.0 (you have to buy a powered router to plug in more than one external drive to expand)Cannot connect directly to computer for transfers. (I knew this going in, so not a surprise)***Update 24 April 2014***So I've had this thing running now for a couple of weeks and still no issues. I finished transfering the remaining shows and movies and music onto this NAS (about 3.25 TB total) which still took time. I understand people complain about the speed, however they need to realize that it is transfering wirelessly, which will never be as fast as wired. I experimented a bit and put some shows onto a blank 1TB WD portable hard drive, plugged it into the USB 3.0 expansion slot and transferred that way and it was significantly quicker... so if you're having issues with speed, try that. Also, while you're transferring don't do other resource heavy tasks, I found that alleviates some of the burden on the transfers. I have had zero connectivity issues so far. My wife, who is on materinity leave, streams shows on the TV all day and has always been able to connect and I have had zero issues when I am home. I have grown slightly irked by the user interface, only in the respect that I like to keep things highly organized in folders (i.e. TV Shows Airing/Arrow/Season 1) and it is difficult to organize if I want to transfer a lot of shows. Not a major issue for me, just something WD may want to work on in the future.***Update 3 May 2014***Helpful tip for people with transfer speed problems. Transfer files using the Network connections on your computer (i.e. Network Devices/WD MyCloud) versus using the WD interface, it also provides a much easier manipulation of files/folders (i.e. moving files, creating folders). I transferred 20 GB in 8 minutes.

While I am tech-savvy, this is my very first experience with a NAS. I bought the 4 TB My Cloud NAS, mainly to use as an external hard drive that I don't have to unplug from one computer and plug into the other, because this one is always available on my home network. Still, the remote access feature is a very welcome addition, since I've always been hesitant of putting my personal files on someone else's servers. Now I have the benefits of the cloud, without the worries of what some third-party might do to my files or their storage service.First, I was very impressed by how compact it is. I was expecting it to be larger, but the WD My Cloud's design an size makes it perfect to be in my living room, which is where I have my router. Setup was a breeze. Like I mentioned, I am tech-savvy so I didn't use any of Western Digital's setup and management apps for my computers. I used the device's built-in web dashboard to set it up and it even guided me through the steps to set up the My Cloud .com account for remote access. My device is working perfectly fine with Windows, Android, iOS and even Ubuntu.Transferring all of my data (203 GB) took quite a while via Wi-Fi, but not more than what I was expecting. Now that all of my data is fully populated, subsequent transfers are much quicker, since they'll be much shorter. I'm not using any of WD's apps. I already had a backup software and it recognized the NAS without any issues. I'm also not interested in file syncing, so there's another WD app I won't be using.I only have two minor gripes about the setup experience:1. The Public share is really public. All of your users will be able to read AND WRITE to it. I wish it supported permission granularity to keep it read-only for most users. I ended up creating a separate share that supported restricting users to read-only access as desired, and will only use the default Public share for document collaboration when necessary.2. There's a screen in the setup dashboard to generate codes for mobile devices. I'm not completely sure what these are used for, as I was able to install the My Cloud app on my iPad and Android phone and tablet, and log in with my email and password, without requiring any funky code.