Hi Gary
Some time back I bought a WD Cloud Drive, only to realise that they wanted me to install their software, create an account, and essential access it via the web only. I had really just wanted to use it as a network drive.
It was a 1Tb running as mirrored 500Gb, and did not want to use it via the cloud access. After a bit of a search, I discovered that I could actually access the drive directly through a public share and just use it as a network attached drive.
In the end the power brick failed, and I used another power adapter, got the tip polarity reversed and fried the control board :-(, proper smoke out of the back fried.
Luckily as I had it configured as mirrored raid, all files and folders where recoverable by a colleague who mounted one of the drives in Linux.
After that I changed it for a Netgear ReadyNAS NVX
http://www.netgear.co.uk/business/products/storage/readyNAS-NVX/RNDX4410.aspx#
If it is on your home network, you should be able to side track all the cloud stuff and should be better, but it will never be steaming quick, that is part of the reason why I chose the NVX it has approx. 100Mb throughput and dual Gigabit ports.
I hope that helps a bit.
