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Add to SafariWhen comparing Western Digital My Cloud EX2 Ultra vs QNAP TS-451+-2G, the Slant community recommends QNAP TS-451+-2G for most people. In the question“What are the best home NAS units?” QNAP TS-451+-2G is ranked 1st while Western Digital My Cloud EX2 Ultra is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose QNAP TS-451+-2G is:
This unit comes with two free surveillance camera licenses that can be used with special surveillance software. If you want to use more than two cameras, you can scale up your surveillance network by purchasing additional camera licenses. Up to 40 IP surveillance cameras can simultaneously stream data to this unit. It supports more than 3000 different kinds of camera.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Very affordable for a two-bay device
At $159, this two-bay NAS device offers great value. It's virtually impossible to find another solution close to this price with such a good performance.
Pro More than capable of managing typical home use
This two-bay unit has a 1.3GHz dual-core Marvell CPU and 1GB of DDR3 RAM. This is more than enough for typical home use, such as web browsing or movie watching. Media transcoding also works great with this device - Full HD videos have a nice and smooth playback.
Pro Simple set-up process
Setting up this NAS is as straightforward as it can get. You can get it running within a couple of minutes, even if you have no previous experience. Inserting the hard disks, plugging it in and filling out a form on mycloud.com is all that it takes.
Pro Save money by choosing one of the pre-populated versions
You can buy this device pre populated with Western Digital hard drives. You can choose between 4TB, 8TB, 12TB or 16TB storage space. This options is more convenient and cheaper than purchasing the hard drives separately.
Pro Users can choose between safety and storage maximization
This unit has two hard disk bays which can support RAID0 and RAID1 configurations. This gives you the choice of maximizing available storage, or halving your storage space in exchange for single-drive failure security.
Pro Great for surveillance systems
This unit comes with two free surveillance camera licenses that can be used with special surveillance software. If you want to use more than two cameras, you can scale up your surveillance network by purchasing additional camera licenses. Up to 40 IP surveillance cameras can simultaneously stream data to this unit. It supports more than 3000 different kinds of camera.
Pro Excellent for home entertainment
This NAS unit performs brilliantly in terms of multimedia transcoding. It can stream Full HD videos to multiple client devices simultaneously without any lag.
Pro Saves power when not in use
This unit has a scheduled power management system. Rather than always staying on standby, when the NAS isn’t being used, it will switch to a system sleep mode which only consumes 0.57 W.
Pro Easy to configure by using it as a standalone station
You can hook up a mouse, a keyboard and a display to this unit and use it as a standalone station to setup and configure it. This is possible because it has four USB ports and a HDMI port.
Pro Expandable storage
You can expand the storage potential of this unit up to a 96TB with an eight-bay extension unit. A cheaper five-bay extension unit is also available. You can also expand the RAM from 2GB to 8GB of DDR3 RAM.
Cons
Con No offline storage or data migration via USB
Most NAS units typically come with USB ports for connecting storage. However, this unit does not offer USB connectivity, which would have been useful for offline storage or data migration.
Con Official documentation is incomplete and unclear
Key aspects such as power consumption or read/write speeds are not available on the official documentation. On top of that, the list of features is unclear and not explained well.
Con Not as many third-party apps as those found for more well established NAS brands
Western Digital is quite new to the NAS market, so it doesn’t have as many third party applications as other brands. Key applications like Plex Media Server, ARCUS and Dropbox are supported, but you may want to check app availability first before buying this unit.
