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Western Digital Debuts New 'My Cloud Home' Personal Cloud Storage Solution

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Western Digital today announced the launch of its latest personal cloud storage solution, the My Cloud Home. My Cloud Home is designed to make it easy for customers to set up and use a personal cloud storage solution to meet all of their storage needs.

The company is aiming to make My Cloud Home the one stop storage destination for all of a person's devices, aggregating photos, videos, and files from smartphones, computers, USB devices, social media accounts, and more.

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As a connected cloud solution, the My Cloud Home is available on any tablet, smartphone, or computer with an Internet connection using the My Cloud Home mobile app, and because it's a local storage product, there is no subscription fee.

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Consumers seek a way to effortlessly consolidate their growing mounds of photos, videos and other files with a solution flexible enough to accommodate content from all of today's devices - from smart phones to computers and from drones to social sites," said Jim Welsh, senior vice president, Client Solutions, Western Digital. "Enabling consumers and professionals to master their digital lives from anywhere in the world is a priority for Western Digital."
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My Cloud Home can be set up to automatically copy content from smartphones and computers to provide a hassle-free backup solution, and it connects to social networks and other cloud services like Dropbox. TV Shows, movies, and other content stored in My Cloud Home can be played in Plex through an integration with the Plex app.

Western Digital is offering the My Cloud Home in 2, 3, 4, 6, and 8TB configurations. There's also a My Cloud Home Duo with 4, 12, and 16TB of storage space, designed with RAID 1 functionality to duplicate content onto a second drive for extra security should one drive fail.

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The My Cloud Home next to the My Cloud Home Duo​
The My Cloud Home and My Cloud Home Duo are available today from Best Buy and other major retailers. Pricing starts at $159.99 for the 2TB solution. 3TB is available for $179.99, 4TB for $199.99, 6TB for $259.99, and 8TB for $319.99.

The My Cloud Home Duo is priced at $309.99 for 4TB, $399.99 for 8TB, $549.99 for 12TB, and $699.99 for 16TB.

Article Link: Western Digital Debuts New 'My Cloud Home' Personal Cloud Storage Solution
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/08/30/western-digital-my-cloud-home/
The current model was exciting on paper but in reality it is an unreliable,broken mess and super slow.
in fact data transfer was so slow that I found this product unusable.
 
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I bought the current model a few weeks back from Amazon. After a few days I sent it back - found it to be slow, unreliable with a horrible user interface, not helped by the fact that the supplied instructions were :
1) unpack
2) plug into router
3) All done.
Unless the UI has been significantly improved, I'll give this a miss.
 
This was a great idea maybe 5 years ago, but cloud storage has become 1) much more reliable, 2) faster, and 3) cheaper for larger storage sizes.

If you really care about your data, it should be backed up in at least two locations and, in my opinion, on device shouldn’t be one of them. I like cloud because I know I can access my data without wearing out the hardware of the storage device, but these things will have spinning hard drives that get used way more often because they’re constantly being accessed. That doesn’t seem safe to me, and definitely not good if you only have just one backup.
 
Exile714 said:
This was a great idea maybe 5 years ago, but cloud storage has become 1) much more reliable, 2) faster, and 3) cheaper for larger storage sizes.

If you really care about your data, it should be backed up in at least two locations and, in my opinion, on device shouldn’t be one of them. I like cloud because I know I can access my data without wearing out the hardware of the storage device, but these things will have spinning hard drives that get used way more often because they’re constantly being accessed. That doesn’t seem safe to me, and definitely not good if you only have just one backup.
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Good luck getting 16TB cloud storage with fast speeds as long as you're in your home network.

Unless you have Google Fiber you'll be looking at slow, very expensive storage.

And no matter the primary storage, you should always plan to invest into local storage for at least one local backup.

Now this device is rather expensive, you could DIY for less and come out ahead in terms of flexibility, but WD isn't the only one building NAS devices with cloud functionality.

Also, some people would rather not store everything in the cloud for a plethora of reasons.

Glassed Silver:win
 
Looks like a cheap price at $310 for a 4TB (2x2) setup when compared to something like a Synology dual bay. Problem is that WD has released so many cloud solutions over the years to replace their previous ones, that it makes you wonder about the quality of these, especially since reviews of the previous versions say that they're slow.
 
Glassed Silver said:
Good luck getting 16TB cloud storage with fast speeds as long as you're in your home network.

Unless you have Google Fiber you'll be looking at slow, very expensive storage.

And no matter the primary storage, you should always plan to invest into local storage for at least one local backup.

Now this device is rather expensive, you could DIY for less and come out ahead in terms of flexibility, but WD isn't the only one building NAS devices with cloud functionality.

Also, some people would rather not store everything in the cloud for a plethora of reasons.

Glassed Silver:win
Click to expand...

But who needs 16TB cloud storage? Unless you’re working with literally millions of raw photos or 4K video for editing, that amount of storage is pointless, and if you are doing those things it’s ridiculously inconvenient.

I guess if you’re trying to use it for a personal video collection that’s something. Otherwise it just doesn’t fit any reasonable workflow I can imagine.

On that note, am I the only one who backs up to 1) external SSDs for working copies, 2) iCloud, 3) external drives that are only used for backup, and 4) Blu Ray discs that are kept in the attic in a fireproof box?
 
I like WD, Amd it's interesting to think about local backup. No hackers, total privacy, no subscription fee.

Tough play though. Offsite storage is important, and can be job-saving as it was to me once. Years ago I wouldn't have imagined I'd be a "back it up to the cloud" person and would have been interested in these drives, but the convienence and ultimate safety of the cloud is too great.

Shame to read about the current generation sucking. Hopefully they fixed those problems.

WD should push harder into personal SSD at lower prices, that's all I would buy from them st this point.
 
I hate to derail the WD conversation here...the idea of a home cloud storage sounds nice, and should be cheaper than a "true" cloud subscription. BUT, then you still have disaster loss chances and sounds like their WD drives are not the most reliable.

What Cloud services are people using? I am trying to figure out a best plan, as I currently just use local backups and KNOW I need to start with a better, offsite backup plan.

Thanks
 
definitive said:
Looks like a cheap price at $310 for a 4TB (2x2) setup when compared to something like a Synology dual bay. Problem is that WD has released so many cloud solutions over the years to replace their previous ones, that it makes you wonder about the quality of these, especially since reviews of the previous versions say that they're slow.
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Most synology can do more than this though. They are basically a very nice user friendly Linux with capility of many things. Right now mine is just cloud backups storage. Time machine. Plex server. About to finish setting up the web server part for me.
 
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Hopefully Western Digital has fixed THEIR infrastructure. I used to manage a MyCloud system and there were several times a year when the service just froze, and no one offsite could access the MyCloud.
 
ColdShadow said:
The current model was exciting on paper but in reality it is an unreliable,broken mess and super slow.
in fact data transfer was so slow that I found this product unusable.
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Weird. I have a WDMyCloud that's perhaps a year and a half old, which has been rock solid reliable and I haven't noticed any speed problems (it mostly handles Time Machine backups and some streaming).
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BJMRamage said:
I hate to derail the WD conversation here...the idea of a home cloud storage sounds nice, and should be cheaper than a "true" cloud subscription. BUT, then you still have disaster loss chances and sounds like their WD drives are not the most reliable.
Click to expand...
Check the forum comments on the article from last week about Crashplan discontinuing their personal (vs. business) service, much of the information you seek is there. FWIW, I've been using Arq backing up to Amazon S3 (not the whole system, just key folders), along with local Time Machine backups. Looking over the options after that article was published, I'm now considering adding a Backblaze whole-machine cloud backup, in addition to the other methods (belt and suspenders and parachute) - they seem to have upped their game since that last time I looked, long ago.
 
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I started years ago with the MyBookLive and it was a great offering for home NAS/mobile storage. Then came the MyCloud and I upgraded to that, using the MyBookLive for rsync backup of the MyCloud. Is it the fastest UI, NO. But it has been reliable with minimal issues.
 
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