Western Digital My Cloud EX2 2-bay NAS Review
by Ganesh T S on March 4, 2014 11:00 AM EST- Posted in
- NAS
- Western Digital
- RAID
Miscellaneous Aspects and Final Words
The Western Digital My Cloud EX2 is a 2-bay NAS, and most users are going to use it in a RAID-1 configuration. Hence, we performed all our expansion / rebuild testing as well as power consumption evaluation with the unit configured in RAID-1. The disks used for benchmarking (Western Digital WD4000FYYZ) were also used in this section. The table below presents the average power consumption of the unit as well as time taken for various RAID-related activities.
| Western Digital My Cloud EX2 Expansion and Rebuild / Power Consumption | ||
| Activity | Duration | Avg. Power Consumption |
| Idle (Diskless) / Sleep (Disks Spun Down) | 5.16 W | |
| 4TB Single Disk Initialization | Immediate | 14.93 W |
| 4TB JBOD to 4TB RAID-1 (Expand from 1 to 2 Disks) | 8h 19m 8s | 27.54 W |
| 4TB RAID-1 Rebuild (Replace 1 of 2 Disks) | 8h 16m 30s | 27.78 W |
Coming to the business end of the review, the WD My Cloud EX2 serves to round up Western Digital's initial foray into the consumer NAS market. The firmware, despite being rich in features, has a few hiccups that WD has already recognized. The performance is middling and the third-party app ecosystem is just getting started. That said, applications of interest to the average consumer (P2P / FTP / WordPress / IceCast etc.) are already available. The cloud access and mobile apps are the positives, and those aspects are definitely attractive to the average consumer walking through, say, the Best Buy doors. The My Cloud mobile app also integrates popular third-party cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Google Drive and Sky Drive.
The platform for the EX2 seems to be better than the EX4. So, it looks like there is scope for performance improvement in the firmware. We are hoping that Western Digital is in this market for the long haul - they need to build out this product line and address the performance issue before the My Cloud lineup can be recommended to demanding consumers with above-average workloads. The firmware updates that have come out for the EX4 since the unit was launched gives us confidence that the EX2 will fare better in the days to come than what our review found today.
The Western Digital My Cloud EX2 is available for purchase today, with the diskless, 4 TB, 6 TB and 8 TB versions retailing for $200, $370, $470 and $570 respectively.
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lours - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link
What is the default setup for the models that come with drives? What capacity are the drives?hlmcompany - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link
As a whole, the unit comes in capacities of 0, 4, 6, and 8 TB. For the units that come with drives, they are the WD Red Drives, such as WD20EFRX, which are slower performing than the 7,200 rpm WD RE4 drives used in this review.ganeshts - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link
Configurations with disks are ready to operate out of the box in RAID-1 configuration. So, a 4 TB model, say, will have 2 TB of usable space.As hlmcompany mentions, the WD Red drives are used.
chubbypanda - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link
Ganesh,Annoyingly enough, some WD previous models (My Book Studio II) would work only with WD Green drives. Looking at WD's list for EX2, situation is better in this case:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=11...
Oyster - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link
This review (including some of the other NAS reviews) seems lacking. What's the point of just showing the read/write numbers without giving us the benchmarks. Like why not show us the comparison to Synology and QNAP 2-bay NAS devices? I'd be more informative to see the performance of things like VM images running off these devices as well. I hope this feedback is accounted for in the future reviews.hlmcompany - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link
Agreed. There might even be some relevancy to comparing the My Cloud EX2 with the previous generation model sold as the My Book Live.ganeshts - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link
We have already taken care of that aspect in the multi-client tests. Each graph has a drop-down menu under it that allows readers to view the results from the evaluation of similar NAS units. For example, this review lists other 2-bay NAS units that we have evaluated in a similar manner before. The ioSafe N2 presented as a comparison in this review is the Synology DS213. Unfortunately, we haven't evaluated any 2-bay QNAP units.We also have NASPT single-client results for more NAS units. Currently working on a way to integrate a comparison with a drop-down similar to what we have done for the multi-client tests.
As for VM images, can you clarify the exact use-case? I was under the impression that users mount iSCSI volumes on VMs, and we already present iSCSI performance numbers. (at least, that is what I do with some of my VMs).
romrunning - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link
To clarify, the comparisons with other 2-bay NAS are only on the "Multi-Client Performance - CIFS" page. It would have been helpful to have them on the other pages with performance graphs, like the Single-client Windows page. That would make it much easier to compare the different models/vendors.Oyster - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link
Well, mounting the iSCSI volumes is good, but what I meant was to show us the actual comparisons of VM images running from different devices. So a use case would be to do a big Visual Studio compile on a VM over iSCSI on devices from different vendors. All these vendors claim virtualization compliance, so it'd be nice to put numbers against such claims. Data could include network throughput and CPU/RAM consumption, for e.g. This would also help us understand how good some of the Marvell processors are against Atom/x86. As it stands now, the graphs are too confusing...Also, as others have pointed out, it's a bit tedious to go clicking through every device from the dropdown and not at all intuitive. If I want to look at HD video playback throughput, I should be able to just look at the line graphs of the different vendors in one chart. Kind of like the video card comparison.
creed3020 - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link
I also have to agree that a comparison to other reviewed devices is lacking. This could be in the form of updates to the charts so that they show different units e.g. Video Cards FPS benchmarks, or done verbally within the conclusion or it's own section doing a breakdown of each test.These devices are not in Bench so we cannot compare the data there either.