WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra NAS Review
Power Consumption and Final Thoughts
When it comes to power consumption the WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra 8TB isn’t too bad. We found that it uses just over 10 Watts at idle and when the unit is first turned on or when the drives come out of their low power state they spike up to ~28 Watts for the few seconds it takes for them to spin back up to operational speeds. If you aren’t using the drives and have drive sleep enabled you are looking at 4-5 Watts of power when the system isn’t actively being used.
During a single user file transfer we found the WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra we bounced around 13-16 Watts of power, which is not alarming or out of the ordinary for a 2-bay NAS device.
Final Thoughts and Conclusions:
The new and improved WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra has impressive file transfer speeds and we were excited to find 93MB/s read and 116MB/s write speeds in our robocopy file test. The performance numbers from this tiny box and the price you pay for it is pretty awesome considering where 2-bay NAS performance has been in years past. For home and small office users that have just a handful of people on a NAS at any given time this NAS should be a great solution for them. With populated capacities of 4TB to 16TB available it means that there should be plenty of space for backing up your data and sharing your content. The WD My Cloud EX2 is also extremely easy to use with several backup options available.
The new WD My Cloud EX 2 Ultra models are available for $159.99 without drives, $349.99 for 4TB, $449.99 for 8TB, $599.99 for 12TB and $849.99 for 16TB. Not exactly super inexpensive, but affordable considering how costly data recovery can be if you have a drive fail. We also added up buying the disk-less unit and the two drives separately and found that it cost about $20 more to build this yourself. All WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra models that come populated with drives are backed by a 3-year warranty with support from WD. The old My Cloud EX2 models had just a 2-year warranty, so we are glad WD lengthened it. The disk-less version still has a 2-year warranty.
Legit Bottom Line: The WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra is a solid perfoming 2-bay NAS that is easy to setup and will bring data redundancy to your home or small office without breaking the bank!
