Gear Review- Western Digital MyCloud 6TB NAS drive for Photographers

    It's been a while since I wrote up a gear review, so I am going to try and catch up.  I am usually positive, but this one will be mixed. Today I am going to talk about my WD 6TB MyCloud NAS drive. Every photographer everywhere is constantly in search of storage, as well as a convenient way to share work, back up from the road, work on multiple computers, you name it. Many of you have probably considered, or are already using, network attached storage, or you own personal cloud server. If you have the skills and abilities to set up your own server, you probably can come up with a great option or fifteen, but that isn't me. I was looking for plug and play, and I found this one and decided to go for it. I wanted several things from my network storage: 1- an easy way to back up images shot while on travel. 2- a simple way to share images and other working stuff between my wife and my computers and 3- another redundant backup when I needed it.

    I'll start with the good. When the drive works, it provides all those functions just fine. I was able to backup all my wedding pictures from Vegas to my drive back home before I hopped on a plane, so even if the plane crashed I wouldn't lose the images. On that day it worked, and reasonably well. That's really all I can say on the good side. 

   Which leaves the bad:

1) Speed. More accurately, the lack thereof. This thing is slow. Those wedding pictures took almost 12 hours to upload. You aren't going to be able to use this as a working drive. I can't speak to the speed of the wifi on that wedding pic upload, but here at home I have a very fast network. 5G connectivity and routinely see triple digit speeds on my speedtests. But transferring 4gb of images to the drive looks like it would take around 8 hours. It's slow. Even trying to access it's interface via the web is an exercise in patience. 

2) Reliability. This is the second kicker. I say the 4gb image transfer looks like it would take around 8 hours because that's the system transfer estimate. I have yet to complete the transfer without the drive mysteriously dropping offline. Sometimes the drive is easy to connect to, other times it is effectively impossible. Automatic backups set to use the drive fail more often than they succeed because the drive just won't connect. 

3) User interface. (background, I am on a Mac, latest OS, all updates, etc.) This sucks. Sometimes the drive will mount like any other on my desktop. Other times it won't and I will have to use the MyCloud App. Which is pretty basic and really not a great interface at all. Other times both these options will fail and I will have to try and enter through the web portal, either through the WD Mycloud site, or direct IP into the drive. Sometimes all of these work, sometimes a few do, other times none do. Some interfaces allow some options, others don't. For example, you can't do anything admin wise to the drive from the desktop application, you have to go direct login. Really, the used experience just isn't there. If I could consistently just have the drive show up like any other on my desktop, that would be all I need, but I can't do that. 

4) Customer support. Non- existant. To get anything done with this drive I have to google around and hope someone else has had the same problem, found a solution, and posted it. The WD help system really isn't all that useful. 

That's the long and short of it. I was hoping this would be more secure and more cost effective than using an online cloud service like drop box or google drive. If it worked it would be, but it doesn't work consistently or reliably, so it really isn't a viable solution for me, and probably won't be for you either.

As I get caught up I will be posting some reviews to other storage solutions that I like better and use, but in the mean time, I am going to go back to fighting to get some files onto the NAS drive again because I am stubborn and hope I can figure it out one of these days.