Western Digital's My Cloud Home Is A Monstrous Storage Obelisk
Between phones, computers, external hard drives, and SD cards, most people probably aren't hurting for storage these days. It's getting all of that content into one place and accessing it easily that's the problem. Western Digital thinks it has a solution with its new My Cloud Home and My Cloud Home Duo storage drives.
On the outside, the My Cloud Home looks like a fairly ordinary external hard drive, though perhaps one that's more ornate than what we usually see. While it is, in essence, a place to dump all of your photos, videos, and files, it has an advantage over other external hard drives in that its contents can be accessed through the My Cloud Drive app. This allows you to access your photos and videos anywhere you happen to have an internet connection.
That internet capability also means that you can automatically back up your computers and smartphones using the app, so any pictures you take will be automatically stored on the drive. Western Digital is also trying to make it easy to aggregate all of your content on the My Cloud Home when you're first getting started – while the app will let you copy all of your content from your phones and computers, My Cloud Home also has a USB port so you can import files from things like thumb drives, SD cards, and other external hard drives.
My Cloud Home is available in two varieties: the standard My Cloud Home, which comes with a single 2TB, 4TB, 6TB, or 8TB drive, or My Cloud Home Duo. My Cloud Home Duo boosts the storage range to 4TB-16TB through dual drives and is arranged in RAID 1, meaning that content you store to one drive will automatically be mirrored to the second, keeping your files safer by creating automatic backups.
Even better is the news that Western Digital isn't going to charge you a subscription fee to use the app – that's included with your purchase price, apparently. Both versions of My Cloud Home will be available in the UK and US with a starting price of £159.99/$159.99 for the standard My Cloud Home and £319.99/$309.00 for the My Cloud Home Duo. No word yet on whether or not these will launch in other regions, but we'll keep you posted. In the meantime, check out all of our IFA 2017 coverage for more from the show floor!