Personal Cloud Storage from Western Digital Gets an Upgrade

The traditional personal computing network centered around the PC will be replaced by mobile-centered “personal clouds” over the next couple years, Gartner predicted in 2012. As part of this shift, personal data storage has shifted to cloud services such as Dropbox, which grew from 100 million to 175 million users between November 2012 and July 2013.

For years, Western Digital has fueled this trend by offering its My Book line of book-shaped external hard drives, giving consumers cloud-scale storage capacity of up to 4TB for as low as $180. This month, My Book received a major upgrade in the form of My Cloud, which brings personal cloud storage to a new level.

Personal Cloud Storage

What Is Personal Cloud Storage?

Some might wonder what a personal cloud is, and why it’s better for storage than a PC. Let’s say you’ve got several computing devices all connected to the cloud through your CenturyLink Internet plan.

Among these devices, you may store many multimedia files, such as photos and home movies you’ve shot on your smartphones and video games, collectively consuming large space. A single movie can run 1 to 2 GB, and Gartner predicts by 2016, the average consumer household will store 3.3 TB. If you’re a heavy gamer or work in a field such as graphic design, you may store even more, but average PCs only provide upwards of 250 GB.

Enter the cloud storage solution. By shifting storage from your PC or other devices to a cloud network, you expand your limits from your individual device to whatever the network’s resources allow. You can thus create a personal cloud storage area scaled to your file size requirements.

The Storage as a Service Solution

When it comes to personal cloud storage, there are a couple popular models. The first, represented by Dropbox, is called storage as a service. Here, a vendor with large network resources rents digital access to their servers’ storage space for a flat periodic rate or a scalable fee proportionate to usage. Storage as a service comes in various forms for both consumers and enterprises. Dropbox is typically used for file sharing. Other popular storage services include Amazon S3, Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive.

The My Cloud Alternative: Storage as Personal Cloud Infrastructure

Western Digital’s new product line takes a different, complementary approach: instead of charging an ongoing fee, such as Dropbox’s $99 a year for 100 GB, My Cloud provides an external drive that gives you your own private cloud storage capacity for a one-time fee ranging from $150 for 2 TB, to $250 for 4 TB. In cloud terminology, this is storage as infrastructure, rather than storage as a service.

My Cloud improves upon its My Book predecessor by adding more mobile integration, including a USB port for directly transferring digital camera files. Plus, if even four TB isn’t enough for you, you can sync My Cloud with services such as Dropbox for additional storage.

Authored by : Dave Gillian: Dave is a PR-social media pro, whose clients range from software firms to consumer brands.

Leave a Comment