The drive doesn't have a fan installed instead, it's cooled by air vents that allow heat to escape through the rear, bottom, or top of the case. They also don't make any noise, apart from some audible hard drive spinning and seeking in quiet environments. All are single-drive NAS devices, which means they are not very big at all. We tested the 3TB version of the My Cloud, but there are also 2TB and 4TB versions available. For all intents and purposes, though, we don't have any issues with the performance of the drive in our tests. The rates you can achieve will vary a little depending on the speed of the storage in your computers, and they will be much slower if you use Wi-Fi devices instead of Gigabit. When writing data to the My Cloud drive, we recorded a rate of 43.23MBps.
Reading large files off the My Cloud to a PC that was also connected to our network via Gigabit, we recorded a rate of 73.90 megabytes per second (MBps).
WD has installed a dual-core, Cortex A9 CPU to control the drive's network functions, and the drive performed well when attached to our network via its Gigabit Ethernet connection.
You won't find any buttons or switches the drive is always on standby and power is managed according to the network activity that is detected. The light can be switched off if you find it to be too bright at night. There is one blue status light on a grey island that hugs the front and part of the right edge of the case.
The physical design of the WD My Cloud is a little different to past WD external drives, mainly because the front of the drive's enclosure now has a cleaner look and feel.