A cloud to call your own

An easy, effective and secure way for users to setup a personal cloud at home.

byKenny Yeo Feb 2016

Seagate Personal Cloud (2-Bay)

The Personal Cloud is Seagate’s newest network-attached storage system and it is targeted at mainstream users who do not necessarily want to know what a NAS is and just need a simple, fuss-free way to backup their content wirelessly or their own personal cloud storage.

The Personal Cloud is available as a single- or two-bay model, with the two-bay variants supporting up to 8TB of capacity. The difference between the two is that with the two-bay variants, users can choose to configure their drives in either RAID 0 (striping) for performance, or RAID 1 (mirroring) for redundancy. Trust us; mirroring is the wiser option here. The drives can be easily accessed and replaced or upgraded by users simply by removing the top panel.

The Personal Cloud comes in black and has a rectangular shape that makes it resemble a Blu-ray player. The two-bay version of the Personal Cloud is also noticeably wider, because the hard disk bays are positioned side by side. There’s a LED status indicator help front to let users tell at a glance if the device is working properly, and at the side is a single USB 3.0 port and at the rear is another USB 2.0 port. These ports can be used for expanding storage. There’s also an Ethernet jack at the rear which is to be connected to your router.

Setting up the Seagate Personal Cloud was a breeze, simply enter the device’s URL in your browser and follow the on-screen instructions. The setup process will also help you create your own password-protected folder on the server. Mac users will be able to backup wirelessly to the Seagate Personal Cloud using OS X’s Time Machine, but PC users will need to download the Seagate Dashboard utility. The Seagate Dashboard utility is easy to use and also provides backups of your social media accounts like Facebook and Flicker, which is a nice touch. Finally, an application called SDrive is required for both PC and Mac users to access the drive remotely. Users can also access contents on their Personal Cloud devices remotely using the Seagate Media app - available free for Android and iOS users.

Performance is nothing to shout about, but the type of users considering the Seagate Personal Cloud is searching for something easy to use more than anything else. And the in this respect, it is certainly a worthy choice.