Western Digital My Cloud Home Duo review: Storage on-the-go

Western Digital My Cloud Home Duo is a compact hard drive that lets you collate all your content at one place and access them whenever you want.

My Cloud Home Duo is an easy-to-use centralised storage unit. (Western Digital)

Let's admit it, most of us prefer buying a higher storage variant of a phone or laptop. More storage just gives us peace of mind that we can hoard photos, music and videos without worrying about slowing the device. That's why, microSD cards sell like hot cakes in India.

Thanks to Google Photos, Google Drive and other cloud services, it has become easier for users not to worry about onboard storage. However, a lot of us, especially heavy users, grapple with storage issues.

This is where portable hard drives come into the picture. But the problem with these hard drives is that their functionality is still dated and don't really give us the advantage of the new-age cloud services.

Fortunately, these external hard drives are also evolving. One of the modern external hard drive is Western Digital's My Cloud Home Duo — a hybrid that gives you a mix of physical external hard drive and the ability to access your content on-the-go.

WD's Home Duo is a more refined and powerful version of the compact My Passport hard drive the company launched a couple of years ago.

Western Digital My Cloud Home Duo is compatible with Windows 10, 8.1 or 7 (64-bit) operating systems, Mac OS X Sierra, El Capitan and Yosemite. For mobile, it supports iOS 9+ and Android 4.4+ — covering all mobile devices.

The retail box includes the small compact drive which is quite heavy, AC adapter and an Ethernet cable. The device is available in multiple storage variants, starting at 2TB, all the way up to 16TB. The device is powered by a 1.4 GHz quad-core RealTek processor coupled with 1GB RAM.

Setting up My Cloud Home Duo is fairly simple. It will require active power connection and plugging with the router (via Ethernet cable). The device can function as a singular storage unit for home, allowing you to back up your Windows and iCloud content. There's also option to link your content with Google Drive, Dropbox and other top cloud services. The content that's backed up can be accessed anytime through My Cloud application.

Should you buy it?
Western Digital My Cloud Home Duo is useful for those who want to have a singular storage unit for all of their data. It's fast, easy to use and most importantly gets the job done. For some users 8TB may be quite a lot. If you're not a heavy user, you may consider the 4TB variant which is priced at ₹24,999.