WD My Cloud Pro PR4100
This month’s cheapest four-bay appliance has the grunt to breeze through all the core NAS services
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE Diskless, £400 (£480 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/276wdc4
The My Cloud PR4100 is the four-bay version of the PR2100, and the family resemblance is self-evident, right down to the slot-based 3.5in drive bays. On closer inspection, a few differences come to light: where the PR2100 relies on LEDs to keep you informed, the PR4100 has a two-line LCD status display plus a pair of inset navigation buttons that let you cycle through the information on offer. There’s also an additional USB 3 socket around the back, making three in total.
Fundamentally, though, we’re looking at a bigger version of the same system, and pretty much everything we’ve said about the PR2100 applies here. That’s no bad thing: all the important network services are supported, from Active Directory to Time Machine, with the mycloud.com website offering easy access to your files from anywhere in the world.
The web interface, meanwhile, remains both clean and accessible. There’s the same decent selection of add-ons, including media servers, a surveillance service and a decent selection of productivity and techie extensions. Offsite backups are handled with integrated support for Amazon S3 and Elephant-Drive, or you can automatically replicate your data to a remote My Cloud device.
Inside it’s all powered by the same quad-core Pentium N3710 CPU, which once again comes with 4GB of RAM. Unlike the two-bay unit, the PR4100 is officially upgradeable, so you can push it up to 16GB if you wish. There’s still no way to play media locally, however, nor any support for desktop apps or virtualisation – which does raise the question of what WD thinks you might need all that memory for.
One area where the PR4100 unequivocally scores over its slimmer cousin is the price. £400 is high for a two-bay NAS appliance, but at £480 the PR4100 is this month’s cheapest four-bay unit. That makes it a lot easier to overlook any missing capabilities, and to appreciate its strengths: even the much pricier Qnap TS453-B has a more modest Celeron processor.
A word to the wise, though – our caveats about pre-populated models apply here too. If you buy a My Cloud Pro PR4100 with four 2TB disks preinstalled, you’ll pay £826, whereas a bare unit plus four WD Red disks comes to £800 bang on. Pick a cheaper brand of hard drive and you can save quite a bit more – confirming this as a great value four-bay choice.