{"id":15308,"date":"2016-04-25T12:20:31","date_gmt":"2016-04-25T16:20:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dougbardwell.com\/db\/?p=15308"},"modified":"2018-06-22T15:35:27","modified_gmt":"2018-06-22T19:35:27","slug":"wd-my-cloud-ex2-ultra-is-digital-storage-on-overdrive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dougbardwell.com\/db\/wd-my-cloud-ex2-ultra-is-digital-storage-on-overdrive\/","title":{"rendered":"WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra is digital storage on overdrive"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ex2<\/a><\/p>\n

As our digital lives grow bigger and bigger, the need arises for more and more storage.\u00a0 With digital photos, 4K videos and all the downloaded movies we accumulate, your computer\u2019s hard drive can quickly become overloaded\u2026and that\u2019s a really bad thing. For every percentage of your hard drive that you fill, your computer is liable to work that much slower, until there is no room for it to do its basic calculations and you get the blue-screen-of-death. Crash!<\/p>\n

Additionally, cloud storage is great, until something goes wrong.\u00a0 After you\u2019ve been accidentally locked out of your account or after you\u2019ve been hacked, you\u2019ll quickly realize you should have been keeping your own copy of all those files as well as using the cloud.\u00a0 Both make perfect sense, but one without the other is not a good idea.<\/p>\n

My Cloud to the rescue<\/b><\/p>\n

\"Western<\/a><\/p>\n

Western Digital<\/strong> has an entire line of My Cloud products meant to solve those various scenarios listed above.\u00a0 Once you decide that you are going to take responsibility for maintaining your own files in addition to any \u201cfree\u201d cloud storage you can get, the thing to consider is a NAS (network attached storage) drive<\/span>.\u00a0 With a NAS, you create your own cloud (hence the \u201cMy Cloud\u201d designation) and now you have access to your contents from home, office or anywhere you have Internet access.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been using the My Cloud EX2 Ultra<\/a> (Model WDBVKW0040JCH) <\/b>\u00a0for the past couple months.\u00a0 It\u2019s available in 4TB, 8TB and 16TB models. It has two bays, with two hard drives, so you can create redundant backups and really be sure your data is safe. It can be configured as RAID 0, 1, JBOD and spanning for some real flexibility.\u00a0 Just remember, if you choose RAID, you cut your total disk storage space in half for all practical purposes.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s so much more<\/b><\/p>\n

In addition to basic storage, you\u2019ll be amazed at all the additional capabilities packed into this Expert Series of NAS storage devices. It comes with its own 1GB of RAM and a Marvel ARMADA 1.3 GHz dual-core processor, so it can perform some awesome functions all on its own. \u00a0In addition, there are two USB ports on the back, so it can host additional drives for additional storage and additional functions.<\/p>\n

\"Western<\/a><\/p>\n

With the My Cloud EX2 Ultra, I can use it as a:<\/p>\n