Western Digital MyCloud DL2100 NAS (Network Attached Storage) is specially made for those who have important data such as photos, archives that they never would want to lose. Providing dual drive bay capable of RAID-1 configuration, data lost from hard drive failure will never be a problem.
I recently got hold of a Western Digital MyCloud DL2100 NAS(Network Attached Storage). The item came in a blue box and not to mention heavy(keep this in mind if you plan to carry it around). Basically, it is a network attached storage device that lets everybody in the same network, connect to the hard drives. The drives would mount or connect just like if it was inside your desktop or laptop. This includes Android phones as well. Yes, you could mount the NAS onto your Android phone and it acts as if the hard drive sits inside your phone. Everything is seamless, fast and convenient.
You may be familiar with commercial cloud storage services such as Dropbox or Google Drive. WD DL2100 is enabling individuals or offices to have their very own cloud storage convenience locally and physically. You can have multiple terrabytes accessible locally, without having to pay monthly for a storage that is miles away and be limited to the internet subscription speed you have.
What makes this particular MyCloud model different is that it was built for business environment. That translates into more system redundancy and failover. The first thing you will notice here is that there are two Ethernet ports, two DC power jack and two HDD bays.
The DL2100 supports two hard drive and can be configured in Raid 1, Raid 0 or spanned configurations.
Raid 1 means that it will give the entire NAS a capacity of one drive but will have the data redundancy of two drives. When one hard drive fails, the data will still be intact inside the second drive. In this configuration, you would have the speed of one drive but have data redundancy.
Raid 0 means that it will use two drives in parallel to overcome the bandwidth of a single drive. When you are reading or writing the drives, it will involve both of the drive at the same time. This increases read and write speeds. With this configuration, you would have massive transfer speeds but no redundancy in case that the drive fails.
Spanning configuration is the normal configuration which uses both hard drive in a normal way. With this configuration, you would get the speed of a single drive and have no data redundancy.
Lets get into the actual device and specs.
Diagrams credit to Intel Rapid Storage Technology (Intel® RST) http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/CS-009337.htm
The Device
The entire NAS setup measures at 21.6 x 10.9 x 14.8 cm and weighs at 3.1 Kilogram. By the first look of it, you can tell that this is a compact and heavy duty piece of hardware. The chassis is made out of aluminium sheet with minimal use of plastics. It is compact, heavy and built like it was made to withstand an industrial environment.
The DL2100 has dual drive bays. In our case, this model came with a total of 8TB WD Red hard drives(4TB each). The default configuration is set to have RAID-1 configuration which means you can use only 4TB out of the total capacity but having the peace in mind that your data will never be lost in case one of the drives fail. This is very ideal for storing important pictures, archives, records and project files.
Right on the front, we can see that there is also a USB port with a button on top. This was designed for uploading photos and videos directly from your camera and into the NAS with a single click of a button.
Over at the back we can see the ventilation fan to keep the drives cool. Over to the side of the fan is another USB 3.0 port, two Ethernet port and two DC power supply port.
The system supports network aggregation up to 2 Gigabit(2 Gbps) or network redundancy for fail over situations. The two DC power port gives users the opportunity to have two different power source connected to this single NAS device.
The DL 2100 supports Network and USB UPS that you could connect to the second DC port. In case of a blackout, the WD and UPS would be able to react in sync and supply power to the NAS. This minimizes possibility of data corruption or unsaved data that is being accessed or transferred to and from the NAS.
| WD DL2100 | |
| Specs | Value |
| Bays | 2 |
| Capacity | 8TB(4TB each drive) |
| Hard Drive | Western Digital Red |
| Connectivity | Two Gigabit Ethernet port |
| Power | Two failover DC power port |
| Processor | Intel Atom C2338 dual-core |
| RAM | 1GB DDR3 |
| Hotswap capability | YES |
| IPV6 support | YES |
| UPS Support | USB and Network |
| USB ports | 2 of USB 3.0 |
User Interface
The connection to the user interface was simplified by WD. All you had to do is enter http://wdmycloudDL2100 into the address bar of your browser and it will straight resolve the IP address for you. I am guessing that they are using some kind of NetBIOS name magic here.
On the first page, you could immediately see the status of your NAS. We could take a quick glance at the capacity and the type of files that occupy that spaces which is pretty neat.
Over to the users tab, you can easily manage users not only for the web interface but for NAS access as well. One great thing is that you could manage folder access at a per-user basis. A user may be granted access for read/write or read only. This is a very nice feture when you want to have a private or separate allocation or folders for multiple users/department in the office or home.
Over to the Share tab, we have something similar to the folder access option but this time, you can specify options such as enable FTP access or NFS access to those individual folder.
Cloud Access enables your WD DL2100 NAS to become a personal cloud. We are all familiar with remote cloud such as Dropbox or Google Drive. Here, we could have our very own personally managed cloud. Paired with WD My Cloud account and the mobile app, we could access our data on the NAS from anywhere via the internet.
The Backups section allows you to create schedules, rules and predefined manuvers for data backups either from the NAS or to the NAS. This feature is pretty neat if you have an external USB drive connected to the NAS via one of its two USB 3.0 connectors. The best part is that you can choose which folder or file would you want to backup from the NAS or from the USB device.
Remote backups and Internal backups are used when you have an external server or another MyCloud device. What is does is that it will backup the files or folder that you selected over to the external server or the other MyCloud device you have installed. It supports backup over SSH for NAS server. If your external server supports MyCloud account, you could just key in your credentials.
For me, the most exciting part is that they also included a Camera Backups mechanism. This allows you to backup contents from your camera without having to do the drop and drag like you normally would on your computer. It can also automatically backup as soon as a camera is connected. A very good feature to have especially when you often go out in the field and needed to have the pictures or videos accessible and backed up instantly when you get back to the office or home.
If you had automatic transfer enable with the Move as transfer mode, all you had to do is plug in the camera into the front port of the NAS and it will copy everything into the NAS and clear your pictures. This is seamless that you don’t even have to think about copying pictures to your computer and deleting it manually anymore.
The only problem I had was with the network setup. I see there is a lot of ‘Network Aggregation’ modes but finding what it meant was a bit challenging and I do not think an everyday joe would be able to comprehend the modes correctly.
Applications
For this setup, I was able to install the Transmission BitTorrent client. This enables you to download or upload without having your desktop running 24/7 and saves you a lot of energy.
You can actually install many other software or servers that supports the WD MyCloud. If you are more experienced, you could SSH into the Linux system and compile/install stuff yourself.
Mobile Phone Intergration
I’ve installed the WD My Cloud application on to my Android phone. The app features local device discovery and also WAN discovery via the My Cloud account.
Via this official application, you could access to all the files and also to extra administrative settings for the DL2100 I have over here. The best part is its seamless backup routine.
When you have auto backup settings enabled, files selected such as your pictures will instantly be backed up to the NAS every time it connects to your home WiFi.
Performance Tests
I have the NAS hooked up to a gigabit router with two connection for full 2Gbps network aggregation. The target host was my desktop which is hooked up to a single 1Gbps connection. To fully test the speed capability, I had the test conducted on my WD Black, 1TB hard drive.
Here are the drive’s potential on a single LAN connection(one network card):
The NAS does utilize full speed without compromise. Theoretically, you could have double this speed if your internal desktop/laptop hard drive supports the speed and have two connections making it up to 2Gbps from and to the NAS.
Do note that it is very useful to always install both of the gigabit connection at the back of the NAS storage to fully utilize the network aggregation especially when you have many users accessing the WD NAS at the same time. Particularly in a business or office setup.
Here is what it is like to browse and watch videos off the NAS on my phone. The experience was seamless as if the NAS was mounted on the phone itself!
Do note that the first video played was a full HD(1080p) while the second one was 720p. Both of them performs well.
Bonus: More videos!
Conclusion
If you use up lots of your hard drive space right now like me or would like to have the peace of mind of securing your data, WD Mycloud DL2100 is the perfect NAS for you. Particularly when you are in an office of business setup where data integrity is essential. Having the huge 8TB array on raid 1 setup ensures that your data is always there even when one hard drive fails.
The WD Mycloud DL 2100 is also very useful if you are in an environment where you have a tight budget for a storage server. The raid 1 configuration is excellent for super fast data transfer especially when you have it setup on 2Gbps mode. One of the good practical example is 4K video editing where you would store on the NAS and edit from the NAS without having to have the video on your desktop storage.
My advice is, if you have the budget for a NAS but not going too big, get the WD Mycloud DL 2100 which is on the mid-range of other NAS storage products. Not too big but not too basic. Equipped with various fail over mechanisms, it can be used for industrial grade environment to a home environment without doubt or hesitation.
I rate this a big 9/10!
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