This is probably too late to be of any help, but just in case it might be useful to someone else, here's my experience: I just purchased the WD cloud a few weeks ago at Costco for $299. So far, it has been performing very well. At first, my wife was very hesitant to let me purchase the drive, but she reluctantly relented. Later that evening she asked me for a flash drive - I asked her why. She replied that she needed to download video lectures from an online course she is taking so I asked her why not use the Cloud? She spent the evening downloading and storing in her folder.
The next day she had a doctor's appointment, was bored, and opened her iPad - in a few moments in an excited tone said to me
"look at this!!!" I'm watching my videos that are on our home cloud???" She's been sold ever since.
For me, I have access to my 25,000 plus photos from my phone and Android tablet.
- I use it for my Picasa albums
- My wife uses it for her recorded video lectures
- Both of us use the personal cloud to store backups of our My documents folders
The device comes with software to create "Safe points" which are essentially backups put on a drive connected to the USB 3.0 drive port built into the unit. You can also backup to another location on your home network. These can be scheduled.
Also available as a free download is an application called WDPhotos, which essentially streams photos to your mobile devices such as iPads, iPhones, Android. When you install this app on your device, any pictures you take will be automatically uploaded to your WDCloud personal storage device via wireless if you are on your home network, and via a simple login if you are using wireless away from home. You also have access to all your photos and media you have on your personal cloud
One thing I would recommend for anyone using any of these NAS devices is to do regular backups. If the electronics fail but the drive is still good, it may be problematic to retrieve the data from the drive because it is typically formatted in Linux. Sure, you could always create an Ubuntu box, and install the drive in it to retrieve data, but what a headache
The second recommendation is to access the drive from regular wired network for optimum speed, especially when you are first loading multi-gigabytes of data the first time