Sure, there are plenty of physical storage options out there, but WD’s new My Cloud does a little more than the traditional external hard drives. For starters, and as the name would suggest, My Cloud can connect wirelessly to your own home (or office) network, allowing you to easily transfer files to and from it. What’s more interesting here, however, is that WD’s making it easy to access the plug-and-play device from anywhere — for example, you can be in a completely different continent and still be able to upload / download files. There’s also a USB 3.0 which acts as an expansion option, Gigabit Ethernet for wired connectivity, DLNA features and an undisclosed dual-core CPU to handle most of the load.
Better yet, because it’s a local network drive, there’s no need to format it for Mac or Windows, making it compatible with both from the get-go and leaving out the need for any unwanted software. To manage things like users, storage space and advanced settings, Western Digital has introduced the companion My Cloud Dashboard, which can be accessed via your internet browser. On the mobile side, there are apps for iOS and Android that allow users to upload photos, videos, documents and other type of files, as well as integrate with cloud services including Google Drive, SkyDrive and Dropbox. The WD My Cloud is now available starting at $150 for the 2TB model, while the beefier 3TB and 4TB variants are priced at $180 and $250, respectively.
