WD My Cloud EX2100 Review

Performance Analysis

In physical terms, the EX2100 is very well made but as we already mentioned, it does lag behind the likes of Synology in a few areas. It turned out to be a little noisier due to its smaller fan and the fact there's no anti-vibration hard disk mounts that are included as standard on most of Synology's current models.

There's not a lot in it, though, and if you're hell-bent on silence in your entertainment room when streaming videos to your TV or projector, then even Synology can't help you there. The capacity you'll end up with once the device is setup obviously varies depending on the storage mode but RAID 1 will result in 3.93TB while spanning mode sees 7.92TB available after formatting.

Speed-wise, we managed to run Synology's DS215j through our new suite of benchmarks and we'll be adding to these as time goes by of course. There's a £40-50 difference between these two NAS boxes and for the most part it showed, with the EX2100 able to out-pace the DS215j in most tests. The torturous Directory Copy and Photo Album tests are the most demanding in terms of file transfers and rely heavily on raw grunt and these were both areas the EX2100 was significantly faster than the DS215j.

The latter was a little quicker at writing in the Directory Copy test though but overall the EX2100 had a definite edge and peaked at 116MB/sec in the quad-stream HD video playback test - matching Western Digital's own numbers. Power consumption sat at 15W idle with two hard disks installed, peaking at just under 19W.

Conclusion

The EX2100 lacks many of the features that are offered even by cheaper Synology enclosures, although the basics are there such as your typical media servers, remote access and cloud storage. In addition, we gleaned from WD that its march in taking the fight to the likes of Synology and QNAP has only just begun - there's plenty more to come this year to make its NAS products far more competitive. However, even now, what it does it does very well.

For instance, setting up remote access and the cloud functions are simple and there are very few if any issues to trip you up along the way. Speed-wise there's a lot to like too. The powerful dual-core CPU is fairly power efficient, with the whole unit consuming less than 20W with two hard disks installed under load, while it's also the fastest NAS we've seen so far in many of our new tests.

The price is a high one - we'd expect more for a £200 enclosure but then you do save some cash optiing for the WD Red hard disk-equipped populated enclosures plus you do get a well-made unit that also sports dual Gigabit LAN ports for daisy-chaining or Link Aggregation. As such, the EX2100 is clearly aimed at prosumers and low-end business users that just need easy-to-setup remote access and cloud storage, while if you're more concerned with features and price, Synology's low-end NAS enclosures are still hard to beat.