WD My Cloud Pro PR4100

GOOD HARDWARE, BUT WAY TOO EXPENSIVE FOR WHAT IT DOES. OTHER NAS BOXES DO MORE FOR LESS.

THE MOST EXPENSIVE NAS here by a considerable margin, WD justifies the high cost with the most powerful hardware of any of the others. With 4GB of memory and a 1.6GHz quad core Pentium processor, the WD edges out all the competition for raw performance. It also has a really great design, with a useful front LED letting you know the current IP address, drive status and capacity and a very neat, very straightforward drive tray installation.

What is not so great about the firmware is the application support. Like Netgear and Seagate, WD is focused more on core features (file and media services) than extra apps, and WD has the probably the weakest lineup of third party apps and additional features of any NAS reviewed here. It doesn’t have a surveillance station and many other apps and services are missing. Its marquee apps are probably Plex Media Server (which does let you use the WD’s considerable processing power for live transcoding of media for mobile devices), Acronis (the outstanding backup tool) and WordPress (for creating your own web site).

On the other hand using and managing the WD is very easy. The simple tabbed interface and excellent suite of desktop and mobile apps can get you running with media services and backup for all your devices very quickly and with little technical challenge.

Still, we wish WD had put more effort into getting third-party developers on board and making their apps available for the platform. There’s some really great hardware here, but that alone is not enough to justify the premium price. If you could do more with the NAS, then maybe it would be worth the extra $200.