In 2015 I bought a 2 TB external hard drive that could be attached to my router and used as a shared hard drive. I use two computers in the house, a desktop (really now it is a notebook with external monitor, keyboard, and mouse) and a laptop for portability. But the documents I use day-to-day are the same, so I keep everything on the shared drive. Microsoft wants you to use OneDrive, but I just don’t want to deal with all of that. Ultimately it is probably more trouble avoiding OneDrive than it is just using it, but I’m a little bit hard headed. One nice thing about that drive, a MyCloud by Western Digital, was that it could make files available to me even when I wasn’t at home, over the internet. So it became a true cloud, not just a networked drive. You could also attach another external hard drive to it and increase the storage. However, the external drive was very slow and the My Cloud wasn’t that fast either. In 2021 Western Digital said they would no longer support the internet cloud function on the device and that feature should be turned off, which I did. I could never be sure how secure it really was. I sent a link to Jeb which he could use to browse movies I had stored on the hard drive, which seemed to work, but a link doesn’t seem that secure. I guess it was okay while it lasted. I was able to access the files from my phone (which was nice) or just about any laptop except the one at work which wouldn’t let me do that. It was a good solution and still is, but then I would need to back up that drive periodically which is kind of a pain and too easy not to do. Plus at only 2 TB it couldn’t store everything I wanted. And the attached 500 GB drive was too slow to be really practical, though it did work. I set up a T: drive on my computers with all of the main storage and U: drive for the 500 GB drive. I needed a better solution.
Western Digital also makes a beefed up solution called a My Cloud EX2 Ultra. It is an enclosure for two hard drives that you can set up a few different ways, including as a RAID where the two drives back each other up constantly and if one fails you can just replace it with a new drive without losing any data (not hot swappable). There are all kinds of RAID servers out there and they tend to be very expensive. Some hold 4 or 6 hard drives. But this device is more for geeky home use and maybe a small business. The 8 GB version (with 2 4 TB drives) was $380 at Best Buy. But you could buy a version with no hard drives for only $160 and then buy two of the exact same red WD 4 TB drives included in the 8 TB version for $87 each, for a total of $334. Or you could buy those same hard drives at Walmart for $70 each for a grand total of $300, so I did that. Later on I found out Jeb has a bunch of leftover 4 TB drives so maybe I could have gotten those for free.
The enclosure itself is really a small computer running Linux that you interface with via web pages. All of the functionality, utilities, and even apps are done through its software. It also has the ability to be accessed from the internet. And it can back up your phone or iPad photos automatically via an app. I got it in the mail from Best Buy in about a week. The drives from Walmart (actually sold and shipped directly from Western Digital) arrived a few days later. It wasn’t bad setting it up, but it took a very long time to transfer all of my files over to it. Like the earlier drive, it has USB ports on the back to attach expansion hard drives, though those would just be shared drives, not RAID. I wasn’t sure the fastest way to transfer files. I hooked up my laptop to the router via ethernet figuring that would be fastest and I was able to move files at about 70 MB/s. It took many hours, but it was nice to get everything onto one drive instead of the three different ones I was using. I don’t think I have everything on there yet. One thing that took up a lot of space was digital copies of movies I had at iTunes. That seems unnecessary since I can access those directly from my TV via apps. I had also ripped a bunch of blu-rays and DVD’s for which I had no digital copies online, so I kept those for now. They aren’t great quality, maybe 480i.
The machine is really noisy, mainly the fan. I tried moving it behind my shelf of blu-rays, but it was still noisy. It needs to cool itself, so I can’t put it in a box or anything, but I thought maybe I could put it in the crawlspace and run wires down to it for power and ethernet. Then the next day I guess it finished indexing all of the files or something because the fan stopped running all the time and now it is generally very quiet.
It can be used as a media server, which maybe I will do someday, though I ran Plex for a while with all of those files I had ripped and it was never of any use. I have so many digital movies on Vudu, Movies Anywhere, and Apple in HD or 4k that I don’t think I need a home media server. I still have the old My Cloud connected for the moment, but I mapped the new one to my T: drive on both computers and it seems to work really well.
I also downloaded the apps to back up files from my phone and iPad. For the phone it can back up everything, I think, but for the iPad just the pictures so far.