Happy with My Cloud but dead end product?

Question

I'm mostly happy with the 4t my cloud that I've had for less than a year. Its reliable. I bought it to not only be a media server but get me out of using dropbox, onedrive etc. The problem is that its advertised as such( a cloud replacement) but Wd implementation of these features is lacking. Ive had to make do with cumbersome workarounds.Recently I was emailed a survey from Wd about experiences with the my cloud and what features I like or feel are missing. It sure got my hopes up that some new features would be coming soon. Now however I see all these updates going on with the Mirror and other devices from Wd including Plex and even a dropbox app, but nothing for the basic mycloud! Did I buy a dead end product that wd has no hope of updating?

Answer 1

doobzz wrote:
I'm mostly happy with the 4t my cloud that I've had for less than a year. Its reliable. I bought it to not only be a media server but get me out of using dropbox, onedrive etc. The problem is that its advertised as such( a cloud replacement) but Wd implementation of these features is lacking. Ive had to make do with cumbersome workarounds.Recently I was emailed a survey from Wd about experiences with the my cloud and what features I like or feel are missing. It sure got my hopes up that some new features would be coming soon. Now however I see all these updates going on with the Mirror and other devices from Wd including Plex and even a dropbox app, but nothing for the basic mycloud! Did I buy a dead end product that wd has no hope of updating?To answer your question of did you buy a dead end product. Yes you did. Most products, when purchased, are ultimately dead end products. Manufacturers (or software companies) may fix certain errors with their products but they rarely add new features to that product. If you were expecting the product to do something that it doesn't, or you need some feature it doesn't support out of the box, then you purchased the wrong product. The Mirror is a completely separate device designed to meet a (slightly) different market need than the WD My Cloud. There very well could be reasons, like due to the processor used on the WD My Cloud or other hardware limitations, why they have not bother to add "features" like Plex or Dropbox to the WD My Cloud Firmware. Or its possible they'd rather not take sales away from another WD product that does support Plex or Dropbox. The WD My Cloud is a relatively low cost product designed to do one or two specific tasks (NAS and DLNA) and it generally accomplishes those tasks. As evidenced by the posts in this forum there are addional features one can add by hacking their WD My Cloud. And other companies such as Silicondust (HDHomeRun) apparently will have modules that can be added to the WD My Cloud to add new features. Plex or Dropbox could choose to add their functionality to the base WD My Cloud devices but apparently have chosen not to. If one takes note of the Plex NAS Compatibility document they'd see that while certain more advanced WD My Cloud devices (like the Mirror) are supported all of them either do not support video transcoding or one or two models (because of the processor used) might support only 720p video transcoding. The ability to transcode video is a major feature of Plex. WIthout it, the software looses much of its usefullnes (at least for me). It, again for me, becomes just another glorified UI interface for a media server with some nice features. There are a whole host of features I'd love to see WD fix or add to the WD My Cloud UI and the various WD apps (Smartware, WD Photo, WD My Cloud Desktop, etc) to enhance the usability of the WD My Cloud and give the end user much more control over the shared folders and Twonky media server. For example, the simple fact that there is no sublevel "share" folder control through the UI is mind boggling to down right stupid. But the fact remains that for a basic low cost NAS and DLNA media server, the WD My Cloud probably works just fine for most people.