WD With New My Cloud NAS

Western Digital Corp. wants to offer “consumers a cloud of their own“, and, to help us do so, unveiled its latest NAS device, The My Cloud

The My Cloud is a standard NAS but with an emphasis on private, personal cloud features. WD wants to help the consumer build its own in-house cloud storage platform and stop rely on third-party solution like Dropbox, Google Drive or Skydrive.

Following the NSA/Prism scandal and the growing trend for in-house storage solution, the company markets this NAS as a solution for consumer cloud storage needs.

WD cited tesearch firm Gartner estimating that the average household will own approximately 3.3TB of digital content by 2016. In line with this growth of digital content is the growth of Internet-connected devices, with the current U.S. household owning 5.7 connected devices, according to The NPD Group

The software for My Cloud has been redesigned from the ground to make the installation process easy. The app, available for desktops (PC, Mac) and mobile device (iOS, Android), once paired to the NAS allow the user to access its files from anywhere.

The app can also be hooked up to third-party cloud storage like Skydrive, Google Drive and Dropbox to offer a unified view of all the files stored in the cloud and to allow transfer of files between clouds. A web portal is also available for users who wants to access their files from different computers.

The device is powered by an ARM dual-core processor, has GbE and USB 3.0 ports for storage expansion. It comes in 2TB and 3TB for now, with a 4TB version supposed to come out next month. This line of products is going to be diversified in the near future to include two and four drive configurations to target enterprise and SMBs in addition of mainstream consumer.

All connections between the app and the My Cloud are secured by 128-bit AES encryption, and the software offers safepoint backup which replicates the state of the NAS on another HDDs plugged-in in the USB port or another MyCloud device.

While hosting its own cloud server seem attractive for people who don’t trust third-party companies, it also means dealing with bandwidth limitation, pushing all the data from all of our devices through average bandwidth speed and relying on home upload speed to access documents, music, videos. It is also missing an important point of cloud storage, offsite location for disaster-proof access.

The 2TB, 3TB and 4TB will sold for $150, $180 and $250, respectively.