As I had hinted in talkingTech episode 38, a way people can backup their data, onto the cloud, but don’t like using services like Google Drive, Dropbox etc, as they fear their data is not private.
So in today’s review is a cool product from Western Digital, aptly named My Cloud Personal Cloud Storage. Basically the device is a NAS or Network Attached Storage, and is supposed to be very easy to setup. The video above showcases the device and a quick setup process.
I bought this off Amazon, the link to the same is available at the end of the article.
Getting it out of the box , we see that the packaging is very well done and I purchased the 3TB (Terabyte) version. 2TB and 4TB versions are also available, but 3TB looked just right for my use.
The box contained an instruction leaflet, two adapter plugs for power, the main power supply, and an Ethernet cable . The adapter’s plugin onto the power-plug, and you would basically choose one that works with your power strip or wall outlet. Then there’s paperwork we generally don’t read.
In the midst of all these is the main device, with it’s white color which would look great anywhere its placed. On the front is the My Cloud logo and the activity LED letting us know the state of the device.
There are ventilation holes on the top, back and the bottom of the device to ventilate the hard-drive within. Being a mechanical hard-drive it would produce heat, especially when you access it a lot.
Not sure which drive is within, but i have heard that it should be the Western Digital Red drive which is generally used in most NAS’s, but not wanting to open it up so soon, we will find out about that later
On the back of the drive we have the a USB 3.0 connector, a gigabit Ethernet connector, the power supply jack, and a Kensington lock to keep the drive from being stolen.
We can attach another USB drive to this and it would add to the drive space available, there’s also a reset button that would reset the settings on the drive administration.
Now lets see how easy it is to set it up, looking at the instruction card, it’s looks as simple as 1,2,3.
We need to first power on the drive, next we connect the Ethernet cable to the router, on one of it’s wired ports and the other end to the drive.
This drive does not have WiFi, but would use your router to provide access to your data wirelessly.
The LED light starts to flash, so that indicates its getting itself an IP address from the router and most importantly is powered on. Once the light stops flashing which is Step 2 by the way , we move over to the system side configuration
On a laptop or computer on the same WiFi open up a browser window, type in mycloud.com/setup. A welcome page will open up and on clicking next will start scanning your network for drives. Once the drive is found, it will provide the option to select language, and setup users for the device. Finally register your product and its done.
A dashboard opens up displaying the free space available which is 2.94 GB out of the box out of the 3 TB advertised. It has tabs above providing and option to create new users, share folders with specific users if you have any and other general settings.
The drive is also accessible as a shared drive via the IP address it was assigned. It will open up the windows explorer window and allow reading and writing files onto the drive.
A mobile app is also available and allows access to the drive not only locally but also via the internet. So you have access to your files anywhere you are.
So that’s basically a quick overview of the My Cloud drive.
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