WD® Expands My Cloud™ Family With High-performance Four-Bay Personal Cloud Storage System

IRVINE, Calif., Nov. 12, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- WD^®, a Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) company and a world leader in storage solutions for the connected life, today expanded its recently introduced My Cloud™ family of personal cloud solutions with My Cloud™ EX4, a high-performance four-bay network attached storage (NAS) solution for creative professionals, prosumers, workgroups and anyone looking for a reliable way to save, share, back up, stream and manage massive amounts of digital data.

"The reception for our recently introduced My Cloud personal cloud platform was extremely positive," said Jim Welsh, executive vice president and general manager of WD's branded products and consumer electronics groups. "Our single drive My Cloud system is the perfect solution for users that want an easy and private way to store all of their data at home and then share, save and manage it from anywhere in the world, on any device. Expanding our My Cloud platform to a four-bay system delivers the advanced features, customization capability and capacity that many of our customers are looking for."

Featuring the category leading WD Red™ line of hard drives specifically designed for home and small office NAS systems, My Cloud EX4 customers enjoy ultimate reliability from the trusted name in storage. WD Red drives are powered by NASware™ 2.0 technology, which improves drive reliability and protects customer data in the event of a power loss or disruption. Additionally, WD Red hard drives feature 3D Active Balance Plus, an enhanced balance control technology that significantly improves overall drive performance and reliability.    

My Cloud EX4 provides several capacity options, allowing customers to choose from a drive-less enclosure that allows customers to customize their capacity and add additional drives as their library of digital content grows, or an 8 TB, 12 TB or 16 TB model¹. With Easy-Slide-Drive technology, My Cloud EX4 allows customers to easily install or hot-swap drives in seconds, without the need for a screwdriver, toolkit or trays. Additionally, customers can attach compatible USB 3.0 hard drives to the USB expansion ports on the My Cloud EX4 to instantly expand their storage capacity.      

Ultimate Data Protection

My Cloud EX4 arms users with multiple options to secure digital data from a potential loss by providing RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 or allowing users to select from spanning and JBOD modes for even more options to manage data. Customers can also use their My Cloud EX4 to back up all of their computers and devices with WD SmartWare™ Pro software for PC users. Mac users can utilize all the features of Apple® Time Machine® backup software to protect their data. The My Cloud EX4 can also backup itself, either to another My Cloud EX4 in a different location, or to cloud services such as Amazon S3 and ElephantDrive. To ensure 24/7 data protection and reliability the My Cloud EX4 includes redundant power supplies and Ethernet ports.

Advanced Streaming and Serving

My Cloud EX4 serves as a home's digital entertainment hub, configurable for up to 16 TB of movies and music that can then be streamed to any DLNA®/UPnP® certified multimedia device such as gaming consoles, smart TVs and WD TV® Live™ media players. The Twonky 7.2, DLNA-certified 1.5 media server and iTunes® server make for simple streaming of large movie and music libraries.

Additionally, the integrated file server, FTP server, backup server and P2P download server provide advanced data serving options for My Cloud EX4 users.

Customers can also customize their NAS, monitor system health, manage users and energy saving features with the My Cloud EX4 dashboard, as well as use a suite of third party apps, including aMule, Icecast, Joomla!®, phpBB®, phpMyAdmin and SqueezeCenter.

Anywhere Access to My Cloud EX4

Available for iOS® and Android™ devices, the WD My Cloud mobile app allows users to view photos, stream video and share, save and manage files from anywhere on their smartphones or tablets. The mobile app makes file sharing and collaborating simple, allowing customers to easily email files, share files as a link, and print and open files with third party apps. The My Cloud mobile app integrates major public cloud services so that customers can easily transfer files from their Dropbox™, SkyDrive® and Google Drive™ public cloud accounts[2].

Price and Availability

My Cloud EX4 is currently available at select U.S. retailers and online at the wdstore.com. MSRP is $379.99 USD for the drive-less My Cloud EX4, $799.99 USD for 8 TB, $949.99 USD for 12 TB and $1,149.99 USD for 16 TB. The My Cloud mobile app currently is available for download from the App Store^SM and Google Play^TM. My Cloud EX4 comes with a two year limited warranty.

Compatibility

My Cloud EX4 is compatible with Windows® 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista®, Windows XP, OS X Mavericks™, Mountain Lion™, Lion®, Snow Leopard®, as well as DLNA®/UPnP® enabled devices.

About WD

WD, a Western Digital company, is a long-time innovator and storage industry leader. As a storage technology pacesetter, the company produces reliable, high-performance hard disk drives and solid state drives. These drives are deployed by OEMs and integrators in desktop and mobile computers, enterprise computing systems, embedded systems and consumer electronics applications, as well as by the company in providing its own storage products. WD's leading storage devices and systems, networking products, media players and software solutions empower people around the world to easily save, store, protect, share and experience their content on multiple devices. WD was established in 1970 and is headquartered in Irvine, Calif. For more information, please visit the company's website at www.wd.com.

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC), Irvine, Calif., is a global provider of products and services that empower people to create, manage, experience and preserve digital content. Its companies design and manufacture storage devices, networking equipment and home entertainment products under the WD, HGST and G-Technology brands. Visit the Investor section of the company's website (www.westerndigital.com) to access a variety of financial and investor information.

Western Digital, WD, and the WD logo are registered trademarks of Western Digital Technologies, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries; WD My Cloud, My Cloud, NASware, WD Red, WD TV Live and WD SmartWare are trademarks of Western Digital Technologies, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries; Windows and Windows Vista are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Mac, OS X Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Lion, Snow Leopard and Time Machine are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. IOS is a trademark or registered trademark of Cisco in the U.S. and other countries and is used under license by Apple Inc. Other marks may be mentioned herein that belong to other companies. All other brand and product names mentioned herein are the property of their respective companies. As used for storage capacity, one terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment.

[1] System is shipped in RAID 5 configuration, which leaves three quarters of the system capacity available for data storage. System is configurable to RAID 0, JBOD or spanned, which leaves all system capacity available for data storage. Up to 0.1TB may be reserved for non-user accessible storage. 

[2] Dropbox, SkyDrive or Google Drive account required. Cloud services may be changed, terminated or interrupted at any time and may vary by country.

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SOURCE WD