WD 12TB My Cloud Home Duo Personal Cloud Storage Dual-Drives, RAID 0/1

The WD 4TB My Cloud Home Personal Cloud is a nifty little device that brings convenience and security to your photo storage needs. It offers some great features that make it an excellent choice for those who want an accessible storage solution without any fuss. Let's start with the setup process, which is an absolute breeze. Even if you're not the most tech-savvy person around, you'll find it a piece of cake to get the My Cloud Home up and running. Just connect it to your local network, and voila! You're ready to start using it in no time. No complicated steps or headaches involved. When it comes to storing your precious photos, this device truly shines. With a whopping 4TB capacity, it offers more than enough room to store a vast collection of pictures. And the best part? It automatically backs up all your photos from your phone as you take them, ensuring that none of those cherished memories are ever lost. Just imagine the peace of mind you'll have, knowing that your photos are safely stored and easily accessible whenever you need them. One standout feature of the My Cloud Home is its ability to invite different accounts to the drive. This means that each person can have their own private space to access their files, and even the owner of the drive won't be able to peek into someone else's stuff unless they're specifically invited. It's like having your own little digital haven where you can keep your files secure and separate from others. Privacy and control at their finest! Now, let's talk about one minor drawback. Some users have reported that transferring files from their computers to the My Cloud Home over the local network can be a bit slow. It's not a dealbreaker by any means, but it's something to keep in mind if you frequently transfer large amounts of data. However, when it comes to photo storage, this device truly excels. In a nutshell, the WD 4TB My Cloud Home Personal Cloud is a fantastic choice for anyone looking for an easy-to-use and reliable device to store their photos. The setup process is a breeze, and it automatically backs up your precious memories from your phone. Plus, with the ability to create private spaces for different users, you can rest assured that your files are safe and sound. Just keep in mind that if you're looking for lightning-fast transfers over the local network, there might be speed bumps along the way. But overall, it's a wonderful option for hassle-free and subscription-free file storage.

IT’S SIMPLE – IF YOU WANT TO SAVE YOUR VALUABLE DATA, DO NOT BUY THIS DEVICE! I run my own technology consultancy business and travel the world with WD portable hard drives in their respective CaseLogic hard cases in my suitcase. They have been all over the world with me in the luggage holds of aircraft travelling to the USA, Europe and beyond. They are reliable, solid and have NEVER let me down. So much so, I now own SIX of them. So, when I saw the WD MyCloud Home, I thought to myself, this would be a great addition to my WD collection, allowing me to use the cloud when travelling, and backing up important business data at home, in the cloud too. As it was, I have just purchased a new MacBook Pro and I needed storage for ALL the data from the HDD of my old MacBook Pro, so this was ideal. It showed up as a mapped drive and could act as a data server. Upon purchase, it was incredibly easy to set up. I plugged it in, set up an account and off I went, loading it with business data, that I could access in the desktop app, in a browser, even on my iPhone or my iPad. Now, trust me, I have run my business for nearly TWENTY years, and I only buy quality equipment with a good reputation. You get what you pay for, as they say, and I thought that paying around £150 for 4TB of storage was a pretty good deal. Not cheap, but then again, not expensive, and I have always held the WD brand is high regard because of their sensible pricing and quality products. That was until 2 days ago, when my WD MyCloud Home simply died. And it died with the entire HDD contents of my older MacBook Pro on it. Luckily, most of that content now resides on my new MacBook Pro, but there were archives in there from older clients, older projects, that I will NEVER get back, which really does piss me off. Yes, I am pissed off about this. Thoroughly pissed off. I have been in touch with WD Support, and Jack has been amazing. Patient, helpful, calling me back. I cannot fault the WD support team, but when they have to tell me that the device has failed and I will never get the data back, I seriously question why WD released the device to market. I was considering putting ALL my family photographs on there last week. If I had done so, I would have lost EVERYTHING, as I would have removed them from the likes of the iPhone, iPad and even the MacBook. The thought of that kind of sentimental loss makes my blood boil. WD are a market leader in data storage. Why, oh why, release a product that does this? Jack from WD Support and I tried EVERYTHING to try to connect to the device. We changed ethernet cables, we connected it directly to my MacBook, all the above, we tried it over a period of about two hours, but nothing. The device won’t power up properly, and when you log in via the WD Discovery app, it just shows as offline, with a message saying the device is offline or rebooting. We tried a hard reset, but again, NOTHING. WD have offered me a replacement device. Sure, that’s great. The existing one is dead, so a new one is due under the warranty. But that WON’T get my data back. Nor will it get my money back from Amazon, as I am now out of the 30-day period. Sure, you might say that I should have another backup. Well, I do. I use iDrive as a cloud-based backup tool, and I also have the majority of the data that was one the WD MyCloud Home on a WD portable hard drive, but it still DOES NOT excuse WD from the fact that this device FAILED and it was less than FOUR MONTHS old! All it has done is sit on the same shelf as my internet router since it was set up. It has not been dropped. It has not been unplugged. IT JUST STOPPED WORKING. So, the warning is right there at the beginning of this review. DO NOT BUY THIS DEVICE! If you have any data you value, DO NOT PUT IT ON ONE OF THESE DEVICES! Period, full stop, end of story. (PS – If there was a ZERO rating for this device, it would have got a big ZERO).

It's ideal for all your basic digital home storage needs such as Video, Music, pictures and backups for your tablet, phone and PC depending what you have on your PC and what size you get. The dimensions are about the size of a nintendo wii height and width is about half the size of a nintendo wii. As shown in the pictures It's really easy to set up and upload your stuff on, and would highly recommend buying one 👌 if like me you would like that piece of mind in making sure your digital footprint is backed up. If you have a lot of stuff that needs to be backed up I would recommend the 6TB and above. Though overall a nice piece of kit to have for the price 👌

We bought this as it looked like it was rhe best value network drive for our media library - although I was a bit concerned by negative reviews We have a big collection of films and music and wanted to be able to access it mainly from our Zidoo media player (Android) and Apple TV but also be able to upload/download from a laptop or PC. It has a “public” folder that does this fine - although the Zidoo box could not find the drive unless we put the name in manually. - a bit odd as it is usually great at discovering drives and folders but it’s now connected ok. We use VLC player on the Apple TV and it found the drive with no issues. What WD regard as the “main” functions of the drive rely on you using the app or desktop software - auto backup of PC folders or Phone pics - if that’s what you want it for then it seems to work fine - Our old MacBook sees it as a time machine drive too without any formatting. If you want a moderate amount of network storage it works - but as others have mentioned- if you use the software it is a bit of a barrier as you can only access the “secure” folders via app/software. - good for backups but not as a media drive. We thought we could plug in our old full up drive and transfer everything directly via the USB port - but this put everything in the “secure” folders and they could not be accessed by Android or Apple box. However - the public folder works as a normal Network drive and can be accessed by any media player (without paying for Plex!) - just what we wanted. (had to transfer old drive via laptop though - 6 hours!!) We got it doing everything we wanted after an hour or so. Hope our experience of the drive is of help!

It took me a long time for me decide to buy this because I wasn't sure whether it would work for Time Machine backups from my MacBook Pro. So this review is for you if that's what you want to do. I had this out of the box and up and running in about an hour. Most of that time I was trying to set up the first backup using a direct connection via USB because that was the advice I found on YouTube. There is no USB to USB supplied and I seemed to have every type of cable except USB to USB. I tried others like Thunderbolt on the Mac to USB on the device and Thunderbolt to Ethernet. But none of these combinations worked. I wasn't able to connect to the device. In the end I connected it up to its final location next to my router. Ethernet out of the router to the ethernet connection on the device. It took about a minute to start up and for the light to stop flashing, indicating that it was ready. They on my MacBook Pro went into Finder, selected Network and MyCloud showed up. I opened the MyCloud server and after two or three seconds TimeMachineBackup appeared as a folder. Reassured by this I then followed the standard Time Machine setup instructions from Apple support. If I had done this straight away, it would have been up and running in less than 10 minutes. I now have two MacBook Pros with Time Machine backups on the My Cloud Home. The first backups do take a long time - 5 hours for one and 8 hours for the other. I left these running overnight after running Caffeinate in Terminal to stop the computer from sleeping.

I had a few basic requirements: a media server for my two smart TV running Plex; a backup drive for a small number of documents and photos; something quiet, reliable and with low power consumption. In I wanted a device that would give me little to no headaches or frustrations over just using my desktop as a media server. In this case, the WD MyCloud Home had too many negatives to make it worth keeping. The good: set up was easy and it was viewable on my phone, iPad and Windows PC in a few minutes. Plex was installed easily too, scanning my media and bringing in file info from the internet automatically. Folders were simple to sync to the drive with a right click of the mouse. The unit looks nice, clean looking with no visible buttons to clutter the front. The software is OK to use. WD Discovery loads up on system start to link up the drive and keep things synced and the iPhone app is OK too and it had the options I was interested in. The negatives: It’s very slow. Connected to my mesh network transfers were a bit disappointing. Performance is frustrating for serving media. Of the five movies we watched while the MyCloud Home was attached, four of them were interrupted midstream with ‘An unexpected Playback Error has been encountered’ message. Clicking back to the menu and it restarted without a further problem but not ideal for my use. The WD Discovery software crashes my Windows PC File Explorer. After installing, I suddenly started getting a blue screen crash . It seems to be the WD software and Windows File Explorer as when the Discovery software was not loaded, the PC worked fine. Couldn’t pinpoint what was causing the crash but it was another frustration. The box never stopped chittering away. The files were loaded in a day but the box never stopped sounding like hard drives under heavy load. It never seemed to stand down. Even setting Plex to only scan daily on folders that it found had changed didn’t make any difference.Also, asking Plex to do a full scan seemed to hog the home network bandwidth as my smart TV couldn’t get an internet connection until I shut down the NAS. This only happened once though so take that as you like. The Discovery Windows app and the iPhone app are just OK, not that intuitive to use or navigate. The box was noisy. Stood on my work desk it chattered and clattered all day while I was trying to work and gave me a headache at the end of the day. I moved it to another room where it’s noise was much less noticeable. None of these issues were deal breakers in themselves but there are just too many of them to make the WD MyCloud Home a pleasure to use. If you just want to back up data and sync files then this may be ideal but this is just too slow and with too many niggles to be a convenient media server over just installing Plex on my PC and turning that on and off when needed. If this thing can’t compete against a decade old desktop PC for simple media serving then it’s not for me, thanks.

After reading a lot of reviews and watching a lot of youtube content I decided to purchase the 12T (6T+6T) My Cloud Home Duo Personal Cloud Storage Dual-Drives, RAID 0/1 To be honest, the reviews and especially the youtube videos weren't giving me the info that I was looking for or they were a bit on the negative side. Anyway, Initially I thought that I could use this device to back up stuff only over the internet, which is nice to mobile back-up, but if you have stuff on your pc or external drive it would be a nightmare. However, this is not the case, as I just transferred all my 2T of backup from my drive into the My Home Cloud just by connecting it to the USB port and then in the My Cloud dashboard you can choose what you want to do with the USB drive that you just connected...and the options are to Transfer from or To the device..fully or selecting the files. Amazing, and you even can track the transfer on the dashboard whenever you want. This definitely met all I needed, and it is extremely easy to use, like super user friendly. I highly recommend this over any other cloud system in house or rented.

****************** Update: After 2 years of use drive failed without any warning taking all data with it. It started as WD update (WD don't even ask you for permission to update! They just do it!) - in the morning I noticed that dive is offline and it stated "updating, we keeping your data safe"... this went for few days until I started worrying and contacted WD support. WD support told me dozen of irrelevant and outright incorrect steps of what to do... until after 2 weeks updating one of WD support staff told me that he believes drive is "bricked". His only advise was to reset the drive to factory settings erasing all the data! Thanks... After further troubleshooting I did, it turned out that one of two drives inside have failed, losing all the data. Now whenever the drives was on the way out or if the update bricked the drive and then bricked the whole device, there is no way to know. Unbelievably, this drive has no self-diagnostics so as a user you can't have any way of knowing if it is going to die imminently. So much for "safe storage" WD... Overall, not only this drive was constant pain for over two years I had it, but as well it has lost me loads of data without any warning and without any way of recovering it (the way it is designed, the data is encrypted on the drives, so you can't take drives out and recover the data form them directly). If you own this thing - I would advise to move your data somewhere else ASAP and throw this device to the bin, it is just huge risk for your data and it is unbelievably poorly designed. I would go as far as calling WD negligent for selling it. ****************** I have bought WD 12TB My Cloud Home Duo thinking that this will be best of both worlds: *access your data anywhere like on cloud *store data locally, in fast drives not limited by obsolete UK internet infrastructure Primary issues with cloud service in UK is that cloud storage is rather expensive. If you have ~100GB of data that is fine, sometimes even free, but if you have much more - say in my case 8.6TB this would cost a lot for a year. Decondly, internet connection in UK is stuck in 90's - I am lucky to have 1Gbps, but that is not generally the case. Talking specifically about my example - uploading 8.6TB into the cloud would have taken weeks if not months and then it would take time every time you want to use data to download it again. So based on what WD has marketed My Cloud Home should be ideal! Right?! They offer 1Gbps data transfers via network ~which in theory translates to reasonable 125MB/s - which is far far higher than average spede one would get via internet. It offer ample of space - 12TB in my case (10.8 formatted). It could as well be configured to 6TB with mirroring (RAID 1) for redundancy if needed and yet one still has full access to files from anywhere in the world like real cloud - so if I have worked on something on my workstation, I can access the complete project on my laptop at work or abroad - sounds perfect! Reality is much more disappointing. First of all the speed makes this device literally useless - I guess it is less of an issue if you have 2TB option and maybe ~few 100's GB - still going to take a day, but that is something overall achievable, however for 12 TB drive is total disaster. I spent 3 month backing-up the data (and I though few weeks would be bad using real cloud!), during the time drive has corrupted itself several times, lost partitions, stopped working in the middle of file transfer etc. I had to reformat it countless times and even now (after 2 years owning it) is still have data to back-up. The only reason I have not finished backing-up the data is because drive is so slow and further it is so unreliable, that for any more important data I just don't want to risk it. I thought that in worst case scenario it is going to be just fancy external drive, but it is far far worse. I have never used mirroring, because frankly it is so unreliable I would not trust any copy of data to reside only on it. It is not compatible with windows back-up or restore, because unlike NAS it is not recognised as valid network drive. This is due to stupid WD Discovery application, which although well intended is useless and works as proprietary drivers and do not support back-up. Further, the drive is just so pathetically slow even if all functionality would work as intended it would take forever. So it cannot be used as NAS, just to drop the files, it cannot be used as backup drive for windows - what it is good for?! I have attached just basic example of moving mixed format files, pictures, audio files, video files, some image files - 68GB total - it took 4 hours!!! How is that acceptable?! Now you may wonder what is the set-up I use and could this be linked to incorrect network set-up. Well - yes I guess it could, but that is not the case here. My Motherboard has two gigabit internet adapters (ASUS Maximus IV Extreme), one of which I have dedicated to WD My Cloud Home Duo - this should not be necessary, but I can afford it for the sake of performance > then it goes directly to 10Gbps Ubiquiti switch > and directly into WD My Cloud Home Duo. Switch itself is connected 10Gbps Ubiquiti router where second port of my PC is directly connect to the internet. Either way what is important here is that connection goes directly from PC via overpowered switch to Cloud drive uninterrupted, entire network is set-up for 10Gbps, so there are now way this is network issue and it is more than capable of handling 1Gbps required for the drive. In fact my second workstation is setup exactly same way and I can transfer files between workstations and I get good 650+ MB/s speeds (limited by speed of SSDs rather than network). I even tried working backwards on assumption that perhaps WD drive is not compatible with Cat7 cables and 10Gbps networking (it is fully backwards compatible, so should not have negative effect) and just in case tried cat6 and cat5e cabling with different switch (Netgear 1Gbps) and still got the same results. If you copying single well compressed file ~ let's say HD video file - I can sometimes get 20-30MB/s which is comparable to cheap and slow USB stick, but if I ever need need to transfer mixed contents or multiple files the speed completely tanks all the the time - 2/3MB/s is best hope. I think it is related to inefficient indexing in the drive, slow buffer and slow processor (of the drive) which cannot sustain contact 1Gbps speed... it cannot sustain even constant 100Mbps speed. In summary, this is just fancy paperweight on your desk. It is a lot of good ideas executed unbelievably poorly. Further, WD support is non existent - I have e-mailed them several times, spent days on their forum and the only thing they can suggest - make sure there are no other processes running in background, make sure AV is not interrupting transfers, make sure you data structure is "efficient", that drive is connected to 1Gbps capable networking and that is it. They don't even bother to look in what is my set-up, just send me the link with all generic advice already listed. My conclusion is that they tech support knows that device hardware (the drive enclosure) is deficient and that it is pointless to issue any software or driver updates - it won't fix the issues. Actually, the drives themselves should be capable 2x6TB WD Red, so I was thinking maybe just to take them out and insert directly into workstation, at least that would be more useful. So.. do yourself a favour and stay clear of any such devices, unless you going for smallest size model and your data transfer requirements are like 100MB per day. The only thing I did wrong - I did not return it immediately, because I thought maybe I set it up wrong and once I have direct 1Gbps line to drive the speed will be better, or perhaps WD going to improve compatibility. Neither of those ever happened and by the time I realised it - I was stuck with this useless thing for good.