Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The WD MyCloud Mirror is a fairly powerful albeit small storage system (two disk bays). The unit I have is the 4Tb version. I also have a WD MyCloud EX2 and the main difference between this model and the EX2 is that this model uses cheaper NAS hard drives, not the Western Digital Red drives the EX2 comes with (which in my opinion are far better drives). Initial setup is very simple. Just attach it to your router and go through some questions. If you want to dig deeper however there are a whole host of options available to you including which system you want for your drives (it defaults to RAID 1 but you can set it to striped if you prefer more disk space at the expense of the auto backup). Digging deeper into the options the MyCloud Mirror gives you, you can turn on media server capabilities (Twonky which is a DNLA application that works well), cloud access (this basically means you can access the device from anywhere and there are a few apps you can download for Android, Iphone, iPad etc. like the WD Photos app which work fairly well), setup the device for iSCSI (basically like having another Hard drive attached to your computer), VLAN, SNMP, port forwarding and a whole host of other options. All of these options are made available through an easy to use web interface. If this is on your home network, one tip I would give is to give this device a static IP address rather than the default DHCP address. This way it is very easy to go to the web interface for the device (just type in the IP address) and you can also get access to any share on the device very easily as well by mapping a drive to \\StaticIP\ShareName. By default there is an admin user with a few shares created but you can very easily create your own users with their own shares, put them in groups for easier management etc. It works quite similarly to the way Windows does File Shares for permissioning and is quite easy to grasp. I have a Microsoft MSDN subscription which gives me access to basically all of the Microsoft Software for development purposes. I use the MyCloud Mirror mainly as a store for the ISO files that I download from MSDN. From there it is very easy to use these ISO's on any computer on my network, a central storage place if you like. I also use it to back up the thousands of photographs I take which I mainly store on my MyCloud EX2, but use this as a backup should that device completely fail (in theory this should not be necessary due to the RAID configuration, if one drive goes bad then I should still be able to get my photos off the second drive however better being safe than sorry), and I can access these pictures from anywhere using the WD Photos app on my phone and iPad. Hardware specs for the MyCloud Mirror won't astound anyone but they are enough (1.2GHz processor and 512Mb RAM) to cope with what this device does (it basically just stores and serves files). Surprisingly the specs are slightly lower than the MyCloud EX2 (1.5GHz processor) however the price is also slightly cheaper. You do get two fast USB 3 ports for expansion or to backup your files. The drives that are in the device are very easily replaceable if you wish to put in larger drives at a later stage. There is very little I can fault with this device except that it only has two bays. I prefer having more like my Drobo devices. Apart from that overall a great little device with enough options to suit almost any situation and the ability to easily get to your files from anywhere (both on your network and from the internet). Given the choice between the MyCloud Mirror and the MyCloud EX2, I would go with the EX2 as I much prefer the drives in that unit however this is a very good unit in and of itself. Update: Great news. Western Digital has contacted me (see comments section below) and are guaranteeing that these units will have WD Red drives in them (now that is great customer service). This was my main niggle with the My Cloud Mirror and the main reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5. As such, with WD's new guarantee, I'm amending my rating accordingly.