WD 12TB My Cloud EX2 Ultra NAS - Network Attached Storage - Dual-Core Processor (WDBVBZ0120JCH-NESN)

I bought this unit to replace my older My Book Duo because of the recent security breach news regarding it, and also because I wanted something faster than my My Book Duo. This unit has an updated and nicer interface and is definitely faster. I bought the 8TB model and use the drives in RAID1 (mirrored) for about 4TB of usable storage. My old My Book Duo used to get me 30MB/s write and about 65MB/sec read speeds, and this unit gets me a little over 100MB/s read and write speeds. It's quite a bit faster, so I'm glad about that.

This is a great entry level NAS box for home networking. I use it mainly for backup and to store family pictures and videos. It's a little slow but I like that it can handle 4K videos with just a small stutter and buffer in the beginning and then it works fine. Data transfer over wifi is ok and it does great as a cloud backup. I would recommend it for the features and ease of use. It would be nice to have a better user end point interface or one that's simple to access.

I bought this to replace a MyCloudMirror that does not support OS5. I tried to copy the Mirror to the EX and was disappointed in finding certain files whose names were not supported by the new OS. As a result I spent almost 36 hours to transfer 1.5TB. Also the EX automatically sets up as a two drive clone. Therefore the useful disk size is half of what you buy.

Great Drive. Fast and super quiet (unless indexing). One complaint is the new MyCloud5 App's compatibility to thumbnail view HEIC photos (Apple's new default format for photos). Thumbnail previews only works when you use the “upload” function in the App itself, not when you do a straight drop and drag transfer. This isn't ideal when you have large volumes of files you need to move from one device to another.

The drive is easy to set up, but linking all the computers is another story. When I called the helpdesk I got someone who spoke very broken English and very difficult to understand. I need to call back because I am not getting errors telling me my drive is full. I only have 500 gigs on my laptop, so how can it be full after not even loading 1/2 of what is on my laptop to a 8TB drive? Crazy!

I like My Cloud EX2 Ultra, but not happy with being obligated to upgrade from my old EX2. One of the biggest problem with this upgrade is the lack of providing a way to transfer almost 4TB of data from the old unit to the new one. When you force us purchasing your upgrade, at least devise plan to assist data transfer.

The device itself setup was easy, plug & play disk installation. However, the network setup is still ongoing (10+ days). My previous EX2 was easy, so I think setup for EX2 Ultra has degraded. Windows 10 21H2. MyCloud.com/setup wants to copy all data to the Cloud. I don't want that. I just want a simple local network storage. Authentication protocols default to mismatch Win-10 (security reasons). It was trial & error setup all the way. There remain inconsistencies from my other two WD NAS devices. Support will send you tons of links to common issues, but you'll have to wade through them all and hope to find one that actually helps. EX2 Ultra works fine once you get it connected.

While I think that the system has great features and find the NAS easy to use, it is not a stable device. RAIDs seem to easily get corrupted and crash. The system is generally fragile. Any interruption of power will destabilize the system and cause your drives to register inconsistently as in good condition or bad. My concern is that the fragility of this device puts your data a risk. I have a My Cloud EX2 and had the same problems, which I hoped that would be addressed in the EX2 Ultra. It wasn't. I hope that the My Cloud team will improve the reliability of this product. It is functionally good, but stability and reliability is much more important.

It was annoying enough I had to buy a new MyCloud drive but the transfer problems made it all the more annoying. When I tried to move a folder to the new drive I would often get the following error message. "You can't copy the item ".wdmc" because its name is too long or included characters that are invalid on the destination volume." However, if I copied the files one by one it worked fine. And of course it would copy some files but not others & wouldn't indicate which ones were copied.

I bought this to replace a deprecated MyCloud EX2. I assumed that it would have all of the capabilities of the earlier model - just more security. I got the unit, set it up. Moved it to the remote office (an optometrist's office) and saved data (photos of patients' corneas and retinas taken during exams) to it. I then returned to my office to download the files to the off-site backup device (which I had done with the earlier model). Much to my surprise, I couldn't download the backup folders. I called tech support and was told that I could download individual files - but not folders. With thousands of photos of eyes and the databases linking them, this would be totally impractical. I am returning the unit!