Review on 🌐 WD 4TB My Cloud Personal Network Attached Storage - NAS | WDBCTL0040HWT-NESN - Reliable and Secure Storage Solution by Brett Bush

This is a difficult review. On the one hand the product works great and now that it's set up I like it. On the other hand, system setup is complex and many normally simple computer procedures are confusing at best. Since setting up the drive I haven't had any problems at all. It has GB Ethernet and transfer is quick and easy. The product is extremely quiet and looks solid. From this point of view there are no complaints at all. But it's complex to set up, and trying to figure out how to do simple things like managing users, creating new folders, etc. is annoying. This is because (1) you don't do the usual things in Windows Explorer like you normally would, (2) there are so many places you can do these things, and (3) it depends whether you have Android / iOS. App, WD desktop app, browser, or Windows Explorer. I've been using computers and programming since 1977 and it took me a while to get it all figured out. I suggest you read ecburr's Devil in Settings review on this Revain site. He took much of the pain to create this. (Cheers, ecburr!) After that, the manual may come in handy as it's well written. But there are so many places to do the same thing, or so many places that appear the same but do different things, that it's confusing. (As you can see, even trying to explain how confusing this is is confusing!) :-) Example: if you go to My Computer (or This PC in Windows 10) and click Network, you will still see three (3) WDMyCloud icons. Clicking the icon in the "Computer" section takes you to the folders on the hard drive. It looks like a regular Windows Explorer window, but works differently. You can't right-click and do normal things like "add new folder", "share" etc. (if you want to do that, read the manual). Twinky website. Clicking the icon in the Storage section will take you to the drive's IP address in the browser and prompt you to log in so you can change the settings. When you click the Windows desktop app, you're presented with a completely different layout that works similarly to clicking the icon in the computer area, but works differently than Windows Explorer. Folder creation, user management, and other typical operations that can be easily performed in Windows Explorer must be done through the WDCLOUD interface and are not intuitive. So it takes time to sort them. Sound confusing? That. I think most of the negative reviews on this product are from people who just couldn't figure out how to set it up and do the simple things they used to do on their computer, not because there was something wrong with the product itself. And of course I understand that. While I could go on and on about the various procedures, which are more complicated than they need to be, I think you get the idea. And most of these complicated procedures only rear their ugly heads during setup. So bottom line: once you figure everything out and set it up, the system works great and is pretty easy to use. But I find it difficult to recommend this to anyone not familiar with computers. If you are computer savvy and willing to take the time to explore the myriad of options available on this product, go for it. If you're even a little confused about computers in general, stay away from WD MYCLOUD drives.