I wouldn't trust these recertified drives. I used to work for an IT services company, but we used to build PC's too, and we used WD drives pretty much exclusively. We used to get a certain amount of failures as you would with any brand, but we had too many issues with WD recertified drives that we could not trust them. You cannot assume these drives are as good as new, because they clearly are not.

It may be that the bad sectors have been remapped and replaced by the spare good sectors at the end of the drive, but this means that as more bad sectors develop, you have less spare sectors available to fix future issues. And as the drive has already had issues, it is that much more likely that future problems will also occur.

Don't use these for any mission-critical data would be my advice.

Thank you for your comments. I've bought one and am reassured by your words and experience

I bought one a few weeks ago. The single drives are severely restricted in what additional apps you can run i.e. none, whereas the dual drives options allow installation of things like IceCast. Certainly works fine as basic NAS, and even though I paid a tenner more, I'm still happy with the £/TB for what it is. At £55 it isn't much more than a plain external drive. As for reconditioned - I've bought half a dozen drives from the outlet and haven't had a problem yet. External drives that have failed on me, it has been the caddy rather than the actual disk, so I just hoik the drive out and use a cradle, but the key is to always back everything up at least once.

got mine, seconds to setup and easy to move files to, but no way of adding apps to the box. it does come with a built in media server which my windows pc and tablet spotted instantly. need to actually have a play with remote settings but seems simply logging in with the email/password throught their android/ios/windows/mac app

Just received two units i've ordered. First one had something loose inside and would not boot (red light flashing even after 40 s reset procedure). The second unit works fine. I did check that the working one is V2 (serial no ends with -10).
The faulty one is V1.
Spoke with WD representative on the phone and they promissed to accept returns with free postage, hovever they would not provide replacement. So at least an hour of my life wasted.
Puts it into perspective: (Recertified), if you're lucky you will be ok, otherwise the way they "re certify" is shove the old customer return in the box and send it to someone else without even bothering to plug it to test it ou.

Owner of QNAP 453A and I acknowledge.

This guy seems to think Plex will run fine on one of these. I hope so as that is pretty much what I want one for. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Q8wLMOU4zM&t=279s

Can someone explain Nas drives to me? Is it i set this up at home and then i can still access everything from miles away? So i could have 100gb of movies and watch any of them from work kind of thing? Struggling to understand how this works if its not the same network yet you can "Access from anywhere"

Also could you access all files from a mac and windows machine?

so how can this device help me?


If I transfer data to the NAS from my pc (via ethernet) then connect this device up to my switch

what I want to know how exactly could my MAC book connect up to my data on the NAS?
I got music and photos mainly.

Thank you to everyone who voted hot or not, commented and helped out with techie stuff on this deal. It was my 1st deal and the experience because of you all has been positive. We will never all agree but in this deal the argument was given in a polite and courteous manner. :sunglasses:

OOS :disappointed:

I got one recently for a little more expensive but didn't although me to run Plex ? Anyone any ideas?

You're right too, an on-site backup isn't a backup.

how old is the drive inside?

Ordered 7 days ago but still not shipped :-(
Was a couple of £ more than this price too.

To give my 2 cents on these, I bought one of these about a year ago, 3tb at £60. On the whole works really well. Use it to serve kodi clients, use it to hold my music collection which I access via iTunes on computers on the network, back up photos from my phone and my partners and store information from work so I can access excel sheets etc on my phone when I know I've dealt with a related issue previously. There are no apps, which I don't miss because I've never had them before, but I'm sure a more functional NAS would be very useful.

Does that stuff well. What it doesn't do well is backing up to an external drive. There is a feature which should allow back to an external drive via USB3, I.e should be quick. Once the full back is done it just does incremental back ups. This didn't work for me at all, I'd plug the drive back in and it wouldn't recognise the back up and want to copy all the content again. To get round this I access the drive via putty, it runs Linux underneath and built my own back up script. Both the mycloud and external drive sit in a cupboard, essentially like a two bay nas but with less chance of failure. I also have a second external which lives off site and I use the same script on that.

I've had two reconditioned drives now, both working fine.

I have been looking at the WD 8TB My Cloud Mirror for a while.
Does anybody know of any good deals on this at the moment?

Not specifically synology

umm...OP you might want to state in the title that is from the Western Digital site? Also is it free P+P?

OOS :disappointed:

I did an excitement wee but then I realised not mirrored. Still voted hot.

Yeah they are quite similar but the Diskstation software was designed better and worked better for me overall.

price probably played a part as well as the QNAP drives were more expensive than the Synology ones at the time I bought one.

I think if you could put the Diskstation software into the QNAP drive for it's hardware and speed, you'd have an absolute beast of a NAS

Arent the OS's very similar? Yep the hdmi out is great - eliminates the need for apple TV.

I've looked in to the QNAP drives as well but Synology's OS won out for me personally. I do like the QNAP hybrid android drive though that can plug directly in to your TV.

Just to reiterate what's been said above.
This particular model is very basic. The OS version does not allow any apps. And the functionality of offers is very basic.
You can root the NAS apparently to extend functionality. But it's a lot of hassle for very little gain.
Still performance is actually quite good. So if connecting via weird Ethernet it would make for a cheap online backup drive. With cloud access to sweeten the deal.

Get a QNAP NAS - i did my research and have never regretted it. I ended up buying the TS-453a - its an absolute beaut, the read and write speeds are incredible. Worth the premium.

Just to let you guys know that I received mine yesterday (I posted this deal a couple of weeks ago) and all it did was flash a red light. So DOA.
Support were not much help, I've raised an RMA request but I'm still waiting to hear whether I need to pay for P&P to return it. Not happy and unless they pay for my postage and provide me with a new replacement I'm going to steer well clear of WDC in the future.:disappointed:

as i said above, this particular model does not run plex - i had one. if you want a nas to run plex, get a synology nas - DS114 and above. it'll be more money but it'll be worth it as the range of applications and what you can generally do on it (remote torrenting for example..).

Arthurly: I've got a cheap Chinese sata/ide caddy that comes out every now and then to access an old drive. Works well and is still working long after a more expensive branded model died and took a drive with it.
Purswani: Out of the box, not, it can't run plex. You can change the OS and invalidate warranty, but there is a high chance of bricking it. I was very disappointed that WD were not more explicit with the details about the single bay Cloud as all their documentation is written with the dual bays in mind, so suggests you can do a lot more.

Dual drives are all fine and dandy, but with two drives in the one case and, in my experience at least, the case being the weak point, I'd rather have two single externals and mirror the data for backups. Not as automated, but once you get into a routine I think far safer.

good find op, heat added

Personally wouldn't recommend anything other than dual bay NAS. People are quick to forget that storing any data on this will also need a backup. If you want a NAS drive, save your pennies and get one with RAID mirroring across the disks.

Single bay drives should only be used as a backup drive, never primary.

All the Apps are for the dual bay version. The single bay version is very basic in terms of Apps/features (basic network sharing and cloud access).

I made the mistake of buying one as a google showed it did user quotas (important for CCTV and other "dumb" services). Only to find out that quite basic feature is only on the dual bays. Lots of complaining on their forums which they've ignored for 3 years :/

I wouldn't trust these recertified drives. I used to work for an IT services company, but we used to build PC's too, and we used WD drives pretty much exclusively. We used to get a certain amount of failures as you would with any brand, but we had too many issues with WD recertified drives that we could not trust them. You cannot assume these drives are as good as new, because they clearly are not.

It may be that the bad sectors have been remapped and replaced by the spare good sectors at the end of the drive, but this means that as more bad sectors develop, you have less spare sectors available to fix future issues. And as the drive has already had issues, it is that much more likely that future problems will also occur.

Don't use these for any mission-critical data would be my advice.

That's where I'm not sure. On their website they show the apps you can run on this thing, but on this specific models page and the firmware documents for this there is no mention of the applications, only the storage and sync capabilities.
The firmware docs say you can set up shares so you shouldn't have to use any application to manage files once you set up share folders.

Actually this is a deal breaker in the (unlikely?) Event it's true. Surely it does basic NFS/CIFS/SMB/iSCSI etc?

so it can run plex and connect to a local network easily ? about all i want at this price is a locally networked drive as anything i'd be playing files through (phone, tablet, pc, shield TV box) are smart, but lot of reviews seem to state it isn't a full NAS and has to use android/windows apps to manage files

This is about as basic as you can get next to network attached storage through your router.
Their OS includes services like php, Plex, transmission and others but looking through the product specifications there is zero mention of this for this specific one. But they are still lacking some applications compared to other brands which have more which is where this just falls short.
Still a great one for the home user especially with transmission and Plex on it.

Good for the average home, not for me unfortunately. Heat anyway

Currently I share my hard drive to my network and in turn view the files on my nvidia shield. Will this drive come up on the network as a drive so I can stream of it?

pretty hard to find on that site what recertified actually entails - it has 90 days warrantee but no mention of how long it can use WD's cloud apps. anyone know what drive it has inside ? seems a decent deal just for the drive

or you were lucky?
many people complain about these WD refurbished drives failing soon..they are returned faulty drives that they have repaired after all.

Have never used a NAS drive before. When accessing it via DNLA does it appear as a normal drive, or must proprietary WD apps need to be used to access files?

Secondly alot of my backups include log files, my LG Smart TV is able to play these via USB but will it play streaming from the NAS drive?

can this run plex ??

Best other price I can find is an ebay seller (98.6% rating) at £99.95 but sold as new

Would never put my data on one of these again after 2 separate drives failed. I'd avoid like the plague especially if they are reconditioned. No heat voted.

I picked up one to run as cloud at home, I just hope there wont be problems with rectified drive. Thanks OP

I wouldn't still use it as the only way you backup your data, especially for a business. I would probably opt for one of the mirror devices since they have two hard drives installed, so if one drive fails the other is there will all your data still stored, all you have to do is replace the failed drive.

I'd use this in conjunction with some sort of offsite backup e.g google drive, Crashplan. With something like this in place the likely hood of you ever loosing data is slim.

Yep I keep looking at these on the outlet it's the lowest I've seen it. I would prefer to buy the mirror one tho for dual backup.

Can someone explain if this would be good to store business documents, pictures and videos as a only back up as i use usb at the moment and im looking for something to ensure none of the work will get lost..... So confused with it all... I just want a stable back up incase my computer ever goes down

I bought one a few weeks ago. The single drives are severely restricted in what additional apps you can run i.e. none, whereas the dual drives options allow installation of things like IceCast. Certainly works fine as basic NAS, and even though I paid a tenner more, I'm still happy with the £/TB for what it is. At £55 it isn't much more than a plain external drive. As for reconditioned - I've bought half a dozen drives from the outlet and haven't had a problem yet. External drives that have failed on me, it has been the caddy rather than the actual disk, so I just hoik the drive out and use a cradle, but the key is to always back everything up at least once.

Recertified is that another word for reconditioned? So hard disk has been reused? Don't want to put my data on reused hard disk, in case it fails!

Great price, have some heat OP. For me, I'm thinking of holding out for the mirror version, just want that extra security.
Update. Went for it, too good to miss at this price. Good spot op. Thanks

cheaper than the one posted a week or so ago. heated from me. good starter nas and you can pull the drive if you upgrade to another model as well.