Las Vegas, NV—WD, a Western Digital company, expanded its recently introduced My Cloud family of personal cloud solutions with My Cloud EX4, a four-bay network attached storage (NAS) solution for creative professionals, prosumers and anyone looking for a way to save, share, back up, stream and manage massive amounts of digital data.
“The reception for our recently introduced My Cloud personal cloud platform was extremely positive,” said Jim Welsh, executive vice president and general manager of WD’s branded products and consumer electronics groups. “Our single drive My Cloud system is the perfect solution for users that want an easy and private way to store all of their data at home and then share, save and manage it from anywhere in the world, on any device. Expanding our My Cloud platform to a four-bay system delivers the advanced features, customization capability and capacity that many of our customers are looking for.”
Featuring the WD Red line of hard drives designed for home and small office NAS systems, My Cloud EX4 is powered by NASware 2.0 technology, developed to improve drive reliability and protect data in the event of a power loss or disruption. Additionally, WD Red hard drives utilize 3D Active Balance Plus, an enhanced balance control technology that improves overall drive performance and reliability.
My Cloud EX4 provides several capacity options, allowing customers to choose from a drive-less enclosure that allows them to customize their capacity and add additional drives as their library of digital content grows, or 8-terabyte, 12TB and 16TB models. The device is designed to allow customers to easily install or hot-swap drives in seconds, without the need for a screwdriver, toolkit or trays. Additionally, consumers can attach compatible USB 3.0 hard drives to the USB expansion ports on the My Cloud EX4 to expand their storage capacity.
There are also multiple options to secure digital data from a potential loss by providing RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, or consumers can select from spanning and JBOD modes for more options to manage data. Customers can also use their My Cloud EX4 to back up all of their computers and devices with WD SmartWare Pro software for PC users. Mac users can utilize all the features of Apple Time Machine backup software to protect their data. My Cloud EX4 can also back up itself, either to another My Cloud EX4 in a different location, or to cloud services such as Amazon S3 and ElephantDrive. To ensure 24/7 data protection and reliability, it includes redundant power supplies and Ethernet ports.
My Cloud EX4 can also serve as a home’s digital entertainment hub, configurable for up to 16TB of movies and music that can be streamed to any DLNA/UPnP certified multimedia device, such as gaming consoles, smart TVs and WD TV Live media players. Additionally, the integrated file server, FTP server, backup server and P2P download server provide data serving options for My Cloud EX4 users.
Available for iOS and Android devices, the WD My Cloud mobile app enables users to view photos, stream video and share, save and manage files from anywhere on their smartphones or tablets. The mobile app also permits customers to e-mail files, share files as a link, and print and open files with third-party apps. It also integrates major public cloud services so that customers can transfer files from their Dropbox, SkyDrive and Google Drive public cloud accounts.
WD’s My Cloud EX4 has the following SRPs: $379.99 for the drive-less My Cloud EX4; $799.99 for 8TB; $949.99 for 12TB; and $1,149.99 for 16TB capacities. The My Cloud mobile app can be downloaded from the App Store and Google Play. My Cloud EX4 comes with a two-year limited warranty. wd.com
