While the personal cloud is a relatively new concept, WD has fully embraced it with its My Cloud family of products. As we've seen in previous reviews, the company's personal cloud solutions are quick to setup, easy to use and can be accessed from pretty much anywhere using WD's desktop and mobile apps. The new My Cloud Mirror is no exception. This good looking, dual-bay NAS is ready to go out of the box with its two hard drives already mirrored in a RAID 1 array. While this cuts the total capacity in half, your data is stored on both hard drives and is still accessible if one should fail. The Mirror also offers additional layers of data protection in the form of USB, LAN/WAN and cloud backups as well as integrated file, FTP, download and backup servers. If that's not enough, it can be customized using industry-leading apps, including aMule, Icecast, Joomla, phpBB, SqueezeCenter and more.
If this sounds a lot like the EX2, you are correct. Aside from the color and a $20 difference in price, the two appear to be nearly identical. It's not until you dig beneath the surface, that you see that there are a few key differences. Feature-wise, the Mirror lacks support for things like volume encryption, DFS, iSCSI and Active Directory. As a consumer-oriented NAS, its easy to see why these features were left out, but there is one additional difference that may be an issue for some. Where the EX2 is equipped with WD's Red NAS hard drives, WD does guarantee that you will get the same with the Mirror. According to a post on WD's forum, the Mirror "will most likely come with Red drives." However, the company "may use any compatible WD drive available when necessary." As a result you may get a pair of WD's Green hard drives or something else in your Mirror.
The My Cloud Mirror is available now in 4TB, 6TB and 8TB capacities. Prices on Amazon.com start at $350 for the 4TB version and go up to $531.
Highs:
- Easy to setup and manage
- Accessible from anywhere using desktop and mobile apps
- Two tool-less, hot-swap drive bays
- Supports RAID 0, 1, JBOD and Spanning modes
- Integrated file, FTP, backup and P2P download servers
- Supports USB, LAN/WAN and cloud backups
- Twonky and iTunes media servers
- Customizable using third-party apps
- Two USB 3.0 expansion ports
- Gigabit Ethernet
- Good looking and well constructed design
- Quiet operation
- 2 year warranty
Lows:
- Mediocre write speeds
- Not guaranteed to come with WD Red hard drives
