Western Digital My Cloud Expert and Business Series NAS

Western Digital last month launched four new network attached storage (NAS) products to meet the increasing demands from prosumers, creative professionals and small businesses. The existing My Cloud Expert Series gets a two-bay EX2100 model and four-bay EX4100, while the new My Cloud Business Series gets  a similar two-bay BL2100 model and four-bay DL4100 model.

I have the four-bay My Cloud Expert Series EX4100 on-hand for evaluation, and I’ll post up a detailed review in a couple of days. Last year, I reviewed the older generation My Cloud EX4, so this will be a nice update to see how the Expert Series has improved with the new EX4100.

Both the Expert Series and Business Series are very similar. The former is targeted at prosumers and creative professionals, while the latter is designed for business users. Physically, they look the same, EX2100 vs DL2100 and EX4100 vs DL4100. They are available diskless, or in various capacities up to 24 TB using Western Digital Red drives.

Under the hood, the most significant difference seems to be the processor that powers them. While the new Expert Series models run off a dual-core Marvell ARMADA processor, the Business Series models use an Intel Atom dual-core processor. The Business Series has upgradeable RAM, whereas the RAM on the Expert Series is fixed.

Furthermore, between the EX4100 and DL4100, the former has two USB 3.0 ports on the rear, while the latter has one USB 3.0 and one USB 2.0 ports on the year.

Both series support volume encryption, iSCSI, support for Windows Active Directory, so it’s not like the Expert Series is any less business-oriented, in my opinion.

An interesting feature on the new NAS models is the support of add-on apps, such as WordPress, Joomla, and several others that you’d typically expect to need a Linux server to run on. In some ways, Western Digital has taken content storage a step higher to the application level. Seeing that these NAS boxes run Linux internally, it’s not too surrpriising that they can run these apps.

Watch out for my Western Digital My Cloud EX4100 review soon!