The WD My Cloud EX4100 is my first NAS. Since I have no experience in this field, it is very important to me that the unit easy to configure and requires little maintenance in operation.
After I had the NAS connected to my network and pressed the power button, I was a little scared: The fan was hard to miss. A short time later but the nightmare was then already over and the NAS was nearly inaudible. Tests have now shown that the NAS when you start always first loud and then is silent. Probably the NAS will be protected against overheating. At first I was skeptical that I get the NAS configured really all alone, the Quick Start Guide has helped me but at least so far that I could connect to the configuration interface easily. A wizard guided me through the first steps and felt after 5 minutes was found the NAS already ready and I was a very tidy interface presents.
In large letters the free space is on the home screen and at first I was surprised that only 11.8 TB should be free. With 4 built hard drives, each with 4TB it should nevertheless be 16TB free space. This is the operating system of the NAS and RAID 5 due to composite, which are pre-installed. Western Digital has the NAS then directly donated an update from version 1.06.124 to 1.06.127. After I started the update, be felt five minutes did nothing. Slight panic came on already, but then the surface has been reloaded and on the home page was published the new version number. There is definitely room for improvement in the software. A progress bar or a side note, that it takes a few minutes would be enough!
Meanwhile, I have a few days in the NAS use and have put a lot of time. The creation of additional shares is as simple as creating additional user. Thanks to an app I can now also access from my smartphone on the NAS and the access from my TV to the NAS is not a problem. So I can put my music, photos no longer use only on my laptop, but also on my other devices.
With the dual-core 1.6GHz processor and fast upload / download with 116 MB / s, the NAS is always fast enough. Since I do not call myself a power user and the NAS only use for backup and for streaming multimedia files, the performance for me plays a subordinate role. To me it is more important that the NAS does not have to run all day and unnecessarily verbrät power. Thanks to the built-in power saving feature, the NAS is started at a defined time and at night also shut down again. If the NAS in between not being used, the hard drives are automatically put to sleep, what to conserve my purse additionally.
Whether for the private user who centralize its photo / video / music and other files and want to have integrated Cloud solutions available anywhere, or even for the reliable network backup (or a network storage) small businesses, this is the EX 4100 ideal. Backup Options, App-Control and even a second power supply as a "reserve" if the first time fails ... or the One-Touch Backup external USB devices - here is thought of everything!
Conclusion: The EX-4100 requires little training time, also to all "get out" what it offers features. But the build quality, the power density and fast performance of this network storage justifies the full 5 stars.
