Simply follow the instructions provided and look for the wdmycloudmirror location, which is typed into Mac Safari like that, or found on Chrome (Windows or Mac) using wdmycloudmirror.local, and you’ll make your way into a setup process for the hard drive.
Believe it or not, this is an operating system for the WD network hard drive, and you’re about to start configuring your spaces to use, also known as “shares”.
When you’ve decided if you want a password or not (since it’s not required), you’ll find the WD My Cloud operating system quite accommodating in terms of getting you familiar with how the system works, with diagnostics and information easily found for your drives, while the “shares” can be created however you want to manage your new drive.
This might be with users on your network — you, your partner, the kids, and so on — or with categories — movies, music, etc — and this is totally up to you.
When you do create one, however, you’ll find it gets added to your share listing, and regardless of the operating system you’re using, when you click into that My Cloud Mirror network device to browse its file listing, the shares will be seen here, waiting for you to drag and drop files and back them up.
And when you back them up, the mirrored drive will make a backup of that drive, also, saving you the hassle.
Testing performance for a network drive often comes down to speed, but there are so many factors here to drive this in a negative way. For instance, if your network is being used aggressively or you’re using wireless versus wired networks, the speeds can change.
However, with a drive such as WD’s My Cloud Mirror, we’re almost at a “smart” level for hard drives, certainly pushing these to the status of network appliances.
With that in mind, WD’s My Cloud operating system — My Cloud OS — is now in its third iteration, and while it can be used to run diagnostics, create file shares for different users, and tell you how much storage you have left, some of our testing can come from the apps you’re allowed to install.
“Apps?” you ask curiously. “On a hard drive? Surely you jest!”
And yet no, because WD’s web-based operating system allows you to take the reigns of the the hard drive and run localised applications, with these ranging from a web-connected server, a synchronisation connection for Dropbox, a test server for various web platforms, and even a music playback system for the old Logitech SqueezeBox devices with SqueezeCenter.
One of our favourite server apps can be found on the hard drive, with Plex there to index any media you want streamed across your network.
For those unaware, Plex is a platform that has apps for a variety of mobile devices, computers, and gaming consoles — Apple TV even supports the system — and is able to turn your hard drive into a streaming solution for all of your media.
Normally, Plex has to run on a computer of some sort, indexing a hard drive that is either internal, external, or network-connected, and grabbing information from an online database, building its own database that you can browse through and play from at any time, but with a Plex app on the WD My Cloud Mirror hard drive, we potentially have a server already, and it’s going to be a lot easier to work with.
Inside the WD My Cloud Mirror operating system, you can install the app from the web, and then set up your Plex system by adding directories.
Unfortunately, WD hasn’t made the Plex setup all that much easier, looking through various Linux-based folder names to find the actual folder you’ve put your movies (it tends to be in something like “/mnt/HD/HD_a2/“), but once that has been done, Plex is there and running on your network.
And that leads us to the performance test, because after running Plex on the previous My Cloud and My Cloud Mirror — drives that relied on the same processor but came with the option of one or two drives depending on the variety that the customer purchased — we found very quickly that the chip WD used wasn’t quite fast enough for shuffling during streaming.
Being too slow to process a video queue gives you an early heads up that the processor will also be unable to handle transcoding, which is one of the ways Plex sends its video to TVs, upscaling when it is needed, which is where a computer is preferred.
So you can imagine how surprised we were when we discovered that the second generation My Cloud Mirror not only posed no problems with media shuffling, but also handled 1080p video transmission to both web browser and smartphone.
That tells us WD’s latest processor isn’t such a bad option, and can handle its own for people keen to start their own internal media network.
You don’t need to, mind you, and WD’s My Cloud Mirror can function perfectly well as a simple hard drive on a network for anyone keen to backup their computers. There’s a little bit of setup needed, but it’s not much, and once the drive is wired in — because there’s no wireless here — you simply need to find the WD My Cloud Mirror drive on your network and send files to it.
