Personal Cloud

I am looking at buying a personal cloud. Main purpose is for accessing files and pictures outside of home, using either Ethernet or wifi in other locations.

Currently looking at a WD 3TB My Cloud Personal Network Attached Storage - NAS - WDBCTL0030HWT-EESN.

Has anyone had any experience of this or would they recommend a different one. I KNOW there are better ones that are way more expensive, but I just want a cheapish NAS unit.

Thank you.
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  • DavidP24
    DavidP24 Posts: 957 Forumite
    The problem with personal clouds is your upload speed, you really need to be on the most expensive fibre packages to for it to work (76mb & above).

    I use Mega.nz and a few other to put certain file on but mostly I rotate NAS units on and off site.

    .
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  • jamesd
    jamesd Posts: 26,103
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    edited 22 May 2017 at 2:27AM
    That's cheap but rather than going that way I've been looking into some of the very cheap Intel Atom based Windows 10 PCs and cloud software. Two main reasons:

    1. Windows Storage Spaces, so with three drives I get RAID5 equivalent protection and the ability to use some old drives in external cases for something useful, home backup as well as the cloud job.
    2. No single point of failure for whatever is on the drives since the array can be moved to any Windows 8 or later computer.

    Of course I will still do things like keeping a normally disconnected drive, cloud storage and DVD burning for things like ransomware protection.
  • fenlander_uk
    fenlander_uk Posts: 625
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    DavidP24 wrote: »
    The problem with personal clouds is your upload speed, you really need to be on the most expensive fibre packages to for it to work (76mb & above).

    I use Mega.nz and a few other to put certain file on but mostly I rotate NAS units on and off site.

    .

    Not only speed. Some providers (e.g. Virgin Media, whose upload speeds are already a small percentage of download speed) further cap your upload data allowance. If you want to stream video, you'll be disappointed.
  • Frozen_up_north
    Frozen_up_north Posts: 2,420
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    Couple of issues with running your own cloud server at home, firstly reliability of the unit and secondly the electricity used may be as much as a paid for cloud backup using a 3rd party service. Running some home computers to spew weather data to sites every few minutes, etc. can cost around £100 a year. I used to do that and stopped on cost grounds.

    There's a review of various cloud storage solutions at:
    http://uk.pcmag.com/storage-devices-reviews/3682/guide/the-best-cloud-storage-and-file-sharing-services-of-2017
  • forgotmyname
    forgotmyname Posts: 32,517
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    I bought a DLINK DNS340L and its brilliant. The power consumption is 15w max. So upto £15 a year. But unless your accessing it constantly it spends most of its time in sleep mode.

    Springs to life when you access it.

    4 drive bays with various RAID options. And if you want to keep your data really safe you could plug a USB drive into it and set it to auto
    back every hour or every day etc.
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  • jamesd
    jamesd Posts: 26,103
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    Not only speed. Some providers (e.g. Virgin Media, whose upload speeds are already a small percentage of download speed) further cap your upload data allowance. If you want to stream video, you'll be disappointed.
    Even the capped upload speed of six megabits per second on the Virgin two hundred megabit download service is enough for streaming 1080p video. The full twelve megabits is about half of what 4k would really want, though. The 120 megabit download ones might be too slow though, if not using decent compression.
  • RumRat
    RumRat Posts: 4,772
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    OP..
    To answer your question, I have a WDMycloud NAS drive and it does what it says on the tin.
    It sits out of the way, contains my film collection for streaming around the house. I share files/films from it with family and friends and I've streamed from it while away from home.
    So for me and my usage, it works. I'm on Virgin Fibre and have never experienced any problems with streaming from it...
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  • tronator
    tronator Posts: 2,857
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    ... Running some home computers to spew weather data to sites every few minutes, etc. can cost around £100 a year. I used to do that and stopped on cost grounds.

    That's a ridiculous estimation for what the OP asked. To pay £100/year you'll need to run a device 24/7, which consumes about 100W. The OP looks for something like WD MyCloud, which consumes 10W or less.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giJhm-eV_HA

    Even my ~5 year old i5 uses only 50W under normal operation.
  • Enterprise_1701C
    Enterprise_1701C Posts: 23,409
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    Thank you all for your input.

    I was a bit surprised at the 100W consumption, but maybe I should have said more of what I was after.

    We are on Virgin fibre, 70 meg. Even if we changed (which is looking likely considering the attitude of virgin) we are within half a mile of the exchange and have fibre to the nearby cabinet, so downloads are unlikely to dip below 20 meg.

    What I am after is a backup and storage for photos and home videos, and this needs to be accessible from outside the house too, especially some files that are actually for our business. It will be used to backup computers when they are shut down, so may well be woken up only two or three times a day on average.

    We are unlikely to stream more than the home movies that we have, and that will only be once in a while.

    I am leaning towards WD because I have found them dependable in the past.

    If anything the unit will be underused, if it wasn't for the fact that we have often kicked ourselves for not having the right hard drive with us I would just stick with a stand-alone hard drive, but outside access is what we need.

    Thank you RumRat for your comments, it is nice to hear of someone with a good experience of similar items.
    What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare
  • DavidP24
    DavidP24 Posts: 957 Forumite
    I still think your internet connection will be your biggest barrier.

    Getting the files up there will take forever because it is the upload speed that is the issue.

    In Corp environment upload is great, is US it is not bad but in UK it is a real issue, even virgin limiting it.

    If it is just for photos and family videos is that not more of an archive function?

    You mention streaming, so is that streaming UP out of your home?

    For example the way Plex will allow you to share your library with friends on the Plex network?

    Streaming DOWN is no issue, not even on a decent ADSL but if you have 3tb of data you are going to lose the will to live while waiting for that to upload on sub 10mb upload, even with 20mb upload speed that data upload better be one off. However, truth is you need it in at least two clouds.

    I have loads of NAS units, but none of them on most of the time, got a 4tb USB powered external drive for local backup, everything there is backed up onto NAS units off site and important "mobile" files are in the cloud with two suppliers.

    You have to figure out what works for you in terms of day to day processes.

    I would also look at Netgear, just for comparison they also have a cloud linked service, videos on youtube
    Thanks, don't you just hate people with sigs !
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