WD My Cloud EX2100 Dual Bay 8TB NAS Review

The back side of the system has a fair amount going on, including a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports for redundancy, failover and easy daisy-chaining. You also get a USB 3.0 port for additional expansion, as well a Kensington lock port and that all important reset button.

By default it’s configured to have the drives inside running in a RAID 1 array right out of the box, so you just have to plug them in and you’re good to go. The array is already built and the OS in installed to built-in memory. If you want more storage you can change the RAID setup to RAID 0 or JBOD as well, but since there's no redundancy in that configuration you should make sure you have a backup in case of drive failure. The drive bays are tool-less and hot-swappable, so it’s quite easy to replace a drive. You'll also note the dual Ethernet ports, which allows you to daisy-chain WD NAS drives to one another to easily increase your network storage, without the need to reconfigure users when you link them together.

The two drive bays are a cinch to open and close, and require no tools or struggle.

The EX2100 sports a Marvell Armada 385 dual-core CPU running at 1.3GHz along with 1GB of DDR3 memory.  The box can be used as a standard file server for both local storage and remote access, and supports media streaming and is DLNA certified. It works with WD TV, Xbox 360, PlayStation TV, blu-ray players and can be an iTunes server as well. It even supports third-party apps.

Here is the pricing direct from WD's as of press time:
EX2100 12TB: $692
EX2100 8TB: $559
EX2100 4TB: $392
EX100 0TB: $249

This pricing includes a three-year warranty if you purchase it with drives included (WD Red models are included for pre-configured versions), or two years if you purchase just the enclosure without WD hard drives installed.