How does this work? Do I store files on it, then have access to them everywhere? So if not at home, the speed will be determined by download. But if I am at home, will I have to download them?
2 Answers
From what I've seen, WD Cloud is like any typical NAS storage that anyone would use. You would access it like any other network drive on your network. The speed for home network access could be up to 1 Gbps. As far as the cloud feature, it seems like you're able to access your drive from the Internet through their WD My Cloud app.
I initially thought the WD Cloud Drive would periodically sync to WD's own servers, but that's not the case. Since you're accessing your drive from the Internet, the speed of anything you would like to download via the cloud would be sent as upload traffic from your home. So the speed you can download from the cloud, depends how fast of upload speed you have at your home.
In my case, this would be pretty painful. I only have 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload. It wouldn't be terrible if I was only downloading a document or something small. With large files, it would be quite slow.
It's also important to know that WD Cloud drives are NOT set up in a RAID configuration. So if your WD Cloud drive crashes, all of the data that is on there is gone. You could try to recover it or pay for data recovery, but that isn't always successful.
Assuming you are home, and your MyCloud device is connected to your local network, you won't need to download your files from the internet, only access them over your local network.
Local speed determined mostly by hardware, more specifically, it can only be as fast as the slowest part of the connection. There are a lot of factors at play here: The read/write speed of the disks in the MyCloud and your PC, the capabilities of any routers/switches between the storage device and your PC, and the type of interface (WiFi, USB, Ethernet etc).
Over the internet, you have the same considerations, plus the likely bottleneck of both the up/down speeds your ISP limits you to and the connection you're using to access your network storage.
