WD aims to give anyone a personal Dropbox with My Cloud

The time has come to take all your important files everywhere you go, with a personal cloud drive that runs at home and lets you access it anywhere using a phone or tablet. Think it’s a dream? Think again.

Built into a new range of external storage solutions, the My Cloud is a hard drive that links up with your home internet and makes it possible to access the files on them using apps on smart devices.

Phones can access important files or photos, and tablets can stream videos, with the whole thing working seamlessly thanks to the reliance on a Gigabit Ethernet connection that a customer plugs directly in via the router or modem router.

“We believe that there’s no place like home for the cloud,” said Jim Walsh, Executive Vice President and General Manager of WD’s Branded Products and Consumer Electronics Groups.

“Our customers have thousands of digital files scattered across multiple computers and mobile devices, but by using a WD personal cloud solution, they have an easy, secure and affordable way to control that chaos, with access to all of their files anywhere, anytime.”

It’s not the first time WD has attempted to bridge the cloud-based divide and gets its local hard drives online, as we saw an effort from the company try this in the My Book Live drives, external drives that relied on a Gigabit Ethernet connection and a processor inside the My Book Live hard drive to run the required functionality.

Unfortunately, the app was very Java dependent, and tended to crash frequently when browsers or smart-devices tried connecting to it.

In the My Cloud version, WD looks to be relying on a new app, a new processor, and the inclusion of USB 3.0 support, making it possible to upload files from USB 3.0 devices quickly, while also being able to plug the drive directly into a desktop or laptop for USB 3.0 storage.

It’s really WD’s attention to the app side of things that has our attention for this, with new apps for both Apple iOS and Google Android, as well as an actual desktop software that makes the drive eaier to manage and connect to.

In Australia, there will be three sizes of the WD My Cloud hard drive to choose from, with $199 fetching 2TB, $269 fetching 3TB, and $349 getting you 4TB.