Customer Reviews

Western Digital My Book World Edition 1.5 TB Network Attached Storage

5 star:		(51)
4 star:		(43)
3 star:		(19)
2 star:		(17)
1 star:		(36)

 

 

When I saw this, I got pretty excited because I'd been looking for these features and they all came together in one drive.

Setup: The setup was easy and quick. Not a lengthy user manual but enough to get you going and more info on the disc. It asks for a driver update when introduced to new machines but I haven't seen a need for it after connecting through Windows Network (although it works with Macs as well, not just Windows). I haven't done much with the remote access but it looks easy to use so far.

Capabilities: It does everything I needed (i.e. let me get to my music, movies and pictures in one place). I watch a lot of downloaded movies on my Xbox 360 so it's nice to be able to put them on the big screen in the living room or open one from a laptop in bed without having to move the file or drive or have it take up space on both machines.

One of the big pluses beyond having your music/ movies available from any computer in the house is that you also improve your computers by freeing up that space - especially with desktops. I used to have gigabytes full of music on my desktop and laptop but now I have a lot more free space on my desktop so I don't need a new internal drive for that to keep it fresh.

Performance: It runs on ethernet and wifi so be careful with reviews on speed. USB connections run about the same on every machine but networking depends on your computer, your wifi standard and your router. If you have a fast machine, a good router and preferably N-WiFi, you'll get good speed. Of course, ethernet connection is really fast but I use wireless N and it's not quite the same but it gets the job done. Speed is only an issue for large file transfer but not actual usage. I haven't seen any hiccups streaming and watching movies (~700MB each) or listening to music.

Price: Some of my friends have NAS systems that house up to 8TB and run about $1,000+ but I'm not there yet. This one is great for the money - especially considering the price of a 1TB alone and the additional features.

Improvements: I wish file transfers were a little faster - I know that that depends on my router and computer as much as the drive, but you can't blame a guy for wanting a little more!

The write up covers a lot of the specs and details on what it can/can't do. This is just my view of the product. Hope it helps!

Just plug in this drive to the power outlet and your router and it shows up as network drive on all the network computers and even in iTunes. On Windows it shows 3 folders: Public, Download & Configuration and on Mac the only first two. I have not been able to create custom folders yet and may have to dig the manual on how to do that. So far, I have also not been able to figure out how to secure the back up data.

The backup software worked well on Mac. It automatically backs up in the background like Time Machine. But this drive does not work with Time Machine itself on Mac. Apple technical support informed me that Time Machine works with USB drives and the only network drive Time machine works with is Time Capsule!

On Windows, the software is so painfully slow that I gave up and have not been able to test it yet. Neither have I tested the remote access through Mionet. The hard drive goes to sleep if it is not used for a while and disconnects from the network. Then you have to turn it off and on again to connect to the network.

You can also attach a USB drive to MyBook drive's USB port to extend storage. But this drive itself does not work as a USB drive. Overall, it works well as Network Attached Storage.

UPDATE 5/16/2009: I downloaded the latest version of WD Anywhere Bckup for Windows and it is much faster and works really well. But you cannot customize backup. You can specify what files you want to back up, like Word document, Excel spreadsheet etc. but it won't let you backup custom folders that are not part of My Documents.

6/14/2009: I have still not been able to secure the data, create custom folders or customize the backup and if anyone knows how to do that, I will appreciate your comments. But I have tried remote access on Mionet and it works. Again, you cannot selectively provide remote access to specific folders. Basic Mionet access is included with the drive, but Mionet keeps on annoyingly nagging you to pay for premium access.

10/10/2010: Now they have made My Book compatible with Time Machine and you have to do a firmware upgrade. With my three computers and using this hard drive as a DVR with Elgato EyeTV 250 Plus Digital/Analog TV Receiver and Video Converter, I was reaching the 1 TB capacity and had a choice of either upgrading My Book to 2 GB hard drive which you can do by replacing the hard drive;or going for a new network storage and I chose the later because Western Digital backup software, both Windows & Mac really slows down your computer. Western Digital listens to the users and except for speed they have solved most of the original complaints since this review appeared year and half ago.

The speed of file transfer also depends on the processor, RAM and operating system in NAS and the first two you cannot change. So I upgraded to Synology DiskStation 2-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage DS210+ (Black), which is more expensive than My Book and harder to set up but has a faster processor and more RAM and is a lot faster and more expandable. For those using network drives for media storage to use with DLNA compatible media players, speed and expandability are very important. And if this My Book is a knife then Synology 210+ is a Swiss Army Knife of network storage. There is probably not a network function that it does not have. It can do it all - network hard drive, Mac Time Machine, automatic backup, internet access for files, Android & iPhone apps for accessing music and video, DLNA compatible home media server, ftp server, IP camera surveillance, one touch picture upload from camera, USB print server, eSATA USB port, iTunes server, mail station, and some more.

If you want a network drive that is easy to set up and use and does just the network backup without extra functionality, go for Western Digital My Book World Edition 1 TB Network Attached Storage WDH1NC10000N (White). But if you are handy with computer hardware and software and need more network functionality, speed and expandability go for one of the Synology units.

I bought this expecting just a simple, no-frills NAS device, but WDC really packed a lot of functionality into this thing. You can access your files via HTTP, FTP, CIFS (Windows shares), or SFTP, it comes with media server software ("TwonkyMedia") built in, and best of all, it gives you full access via SSH to the Linux-based OS running under the hood. The amount of tinkering potential this little thing has is a power user's dream.

The WD My Book World Edition is a NAS aimed squarely at the general consumer. With a good blend of features and (relatively) easy set-up, it's the NAS for the non-nerd. I tested it out on my home network, using both Mac and Windows machines. I should mention that I have a more feature rich NAS (a Dlink DNS-321) that is my primary network storage solution and is in no danger of being replaced by the World Book. It's not that the World Book isn't great at what it does, it's just that it's feature set is more limited than a true NAS with swappable hard drives and more customizable settings.

WD has put an emphasis on making the My Book easy to set up and configure. Admittedly I am probably more knowledgeable than the average consumer when it comes to using networked storage, but I found getting the My Book up and running to be very simple once I updated to the correct drivers for Windows 7 64-bit to take advantage of the back up features. WD provides a "discovery" program to help you map the drive, but it's not necessary if you know how to map drives in Windows. If all you want to do is have a networked drive for backing up files (or whole computers) with a minimum of fuss, this is a great option. It is virtually plug-and-play if that is all you want to do.

However, for more advances uses (FTP Server for example) a little more know-how is required. If you are willing to read forum posts on WD's support page, it's really pretty easy even if you don't have a lot of experience working with setting up IP addresses and ports.

Streaming media files is also relatively easy, especially if you are using Windows 7. Just connect the My Book to your network, load up your media collection, and any Windows 7 (or Vista for that matter) machine will automatically recognize it as a media streamer. You will be able to access your files through WMP11 (Windows Media Player 11). It also interfaces very well with WD's excellent WD TV Live media streamer. Support for itunes server is also provided, making streaming versatile regardless of if you use Mac or PC hardware.

The real limitation of this NAS in my opinion is the data transfer speed over gigabit LAN. Even though it is rated as Gigabit, the transfer speeds are still limited by the processor and available RAM. The My Book has an underpowered processor in my opinion. Th best data transfer rates I could get were around 9mbs\sec. That should be fine for streaming most media files, but for very large HD files, it is conceivable you could get stuttering or dropped frames. The slower transfer/read speeds also mean that getting files on and off the My Book can take longer than with a higher powered NAS.

Build quality of the My Book is excellent and it has nice aesthetics in my opinion. I've had nothing but good experiences with WD hard drives (I have various versions of them in all of my computers) over the years. I believe that they have about the best reliability out there. Heat management is passive, which is always a concern for me when talking about hard drive lifespan. Interestingly, the warranty for the NAS enclosure is just a year, while the WD hard drive itself is 5 years! I would prefer if WD backed up the enclosure with the same warranty length as the drive it houses.

I still prefer a more feature rich NAS (swappable RAID drives being the most important), but the WD My Book impressed me with it's easy set-up and great range of features. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to back up more than one computer over a network as well as stream media files. For more advanced users, I'd suggest getting a more expensive and versatile NAS with a faster processor to also take advantage of superior transfer speeds.

4/5 Stars. Easy to set-up and manage with a minimum of tech knowledge, but with slower transfer speeds than some other models.

This is the first Western Digital Product I've ever used that felt less than top-drawer. I started out wanting to love it, but the bundled software is less than a happy choice.

Physicals? Looks good, hooks up easily, runs quietly. As to hardware, Western Digital has always had that nailed.
Installation & Use? Uh-oh. They ought to go back to Square One.

The included software wants to totally insulate you from the drive. It wants to create aliases for the top-level directories you create on it, immediately using a peck of allowable drive names. Left to itself, it assigns them from the back of the alphabet: Z:, Y:, X:, and so forth. So this Network Attached Storage (NAS) looks like a series of hard drives attached to your system, which you'll find on My Computer, not on My Network Places. As a network resource, this is counterintuitive. STRIKE ONE.

I am the chief of the family's LAN and I'm the one who has to fix issues. This approach hides directories set up by other family members, meaning I've got to take over their machines to help on any problem.
Fortunately, if you're smart enough to noodle around in the Workgroup level of your LAN, you can find and get access to the top-level directories outside of the aliases, but nothing in the Help will tell you how to do that.

Next, the software locks directories, even those for which you configured user names and passwords. The directory where my own computer's backup is stored is now listed as a disconnected network drive and attempting to use the alias gets this error message: MULTIPLE CONNECTIONS TO A SERVER OR SHARED RESOURCE BY THE SAME USER, USING MORE THAN ONE USER NAME, IS NOT ALLOWED.DISCONNECT ALL PREVIOUS CONNECTIONS TO THE SERVER OR SHARED RESOURCE AND TRY AGAIN. Since this comes up after rebooting the Western Digital drive AND my computer, I have to assume it's the backup software claiming the directory and locking it. It doesn't even ask for the user name and password I set up for the directory. STRIKE TWO.

I set up the included Memeo backup software and it nicely decided to run at a priority level whereby I could use my machine for something more than its screen-saver during the backup. Problem with this setup: it is far to easy to sweep in stuff you have no intent of backing up. It offers to backup all images, for instance. Well, that means every stinking little icon or graphic anywhere on your computer. If you're a gamer, as am I, it will backup every image it finds in each of your games, when all you really wanted was the family photos. It doesn't get any better in advanced mode, where you try to pare this stuff down more exactly. Apparently you have to exclude all these places where game images may be. Same thing for sound files and videos. You want to backup your ripped CDs and your cache of YouTube videos - but every "whiz" and "bang" and voice in each of your games will be relentlessly hunted down and backed up. The wording of the selection criteria also makes it look as though files that meet two criteria get backed up twice - for instance, if you check the boxes to back up "My Documents" and "Financial Files", and your Quicken files are stored in My Documents, will it back them up twice? Memeo answered my emailed question with a "no", but allowed they may need to tweak what the program says, because it is misleading.

But why do you care if it backs up extra stuff? It's a nice big ONE TERABYTE drive, for gosh sake! Here's the answer - it's dead slow at backing up. Once it took my criteria for what to back up, it started cranking... and kept cranking... for FORTY-EIGHT HOURS, during which it copied FIFTY-ONE GIGABYTES. Without running the calculation to be sure, I feel confident that if I had a pile of 3.5" diskettes I was willing to keep feeding, I could copy 51 GB in FAR less time than this. Sure, I saw that it was doing housekeeping too, like verifying each file was an accurate copy, but c'mon. If this were a USB drive attached directly to my computer and I gave it a list of directories to copy, the job would be done in minutes. I can't countenance the performance difference between that and Memeo's software. And, oh yeah, you can't schedule your backups for the middle of the night, because Western Digital only saw fit to give you Memeo's basic product, and if you want features like you get from MozyHome Online Backup (for free), you're going to have to buy an upgrade from Memeo. STRIKE THREE.

At this point I haven't tried remote access of the NAS drive across the Internet. I don't need this feature.

My takeaway -
I'm teetotally aggravated by the software that came with this drive. You will probably do better if you simply let each PC on your LAN find drivers on the Internet, instead of installing this junk. Get something different to do your backups; Memeo is not ready for prime time.

I took out my busy schedule just to tell everyone that you should be aware about the transfer speed of this network drive.

I got about 1 MB per sec on average. Much slower than my USB external drive transfer speeds.

So I called support, was told that the maximum speed of transfer for mybookworld is 3-5 Mbps.

CRAP>>!!

but look at how it's advertised?? Do you think anything wrong?

High-speed data transfer with Gigabit Ethernet - Gigabit networking and transfer rates are up to five to six times faster than other standard 10/100 Ethernet network storage systems. This performance is comparable to USB 2.0 direct-attached storage. Your results will vary based on the file size and format, settings, features, software and other factors.

I am very disappointed with this drive. I am a computer programmer (C#/C++) by profession, and a computer geek for fun. I build my own computers from parts, and run a nice little network @ home and at my office. I've been doing these things for several years now. I know my way around computer/network equipment.

As a part of my job, I build "gold disks" for my company's product. We use Western Digital drives exclusively. And, I've been using NOTHING but WD drives in my own builds for well over 15 years. I am a huge WD fan, because I know I can trust the company and its products.

My opinion of Western Digital just sank very deeply tonight (2010-02-15).

On Thursday (2010-02-11), I received my new My Book, World Edition (1 TB) from Amazon. I plugged it in, and turned it on, expecting to see the drive in a few minutes -- but that didn't happen. It took nearly an hour of fussing around until the WD Discovery tool would even see the drive. Admittedly, some of that was due to my network, but not all. Part of the problem was that I use MAC address filtering, and I had to get the MAC off of the WD drive. The label on which it is printed is EXTREMELY small, with the tiniest of fonts! The serial number for this drive is on the same label. The label is is printed so small that it is nearly illegible.

Once I got access to the drive, I went through the initial configuration process. During that process, one is offered the chance to do such things as set a name for the device, and provide a new administrative password. I chose to set a new name for the device, as well as provide a new administrative user/password -- great! I like that these options are available. However, when I got to the point of submitting this information, the web page served up by this unit froze (no response after a long time). For several minutes, the web interface wouldn't respond, so I had to reboot the unit. Then, when I was able to connect again, although the unit had been renamed properly, the new administrative password did not work. Neither did the old (default) password. Huh? So, after a quick search of the web, I found out that the administrative user's credentials could be restored to their default settings by pressing reset button on the unit, which I did. Back in business. I decided to leave the default password in place.

The next step for me was to create a desktop shortcut to the drive (giving me access to the drive's shares), and install the WD Anywhere Backup software. The install was pretty easy, and so was using the software. However, there was a nag screen saying I was using the software under a 31-day trial, and that I could buy the software. On this screen was an option to either enter a Product Key, or Find a Valid WD My Book. I first chose to have the nag find my WD drive, but it would not, even after repeated attempts -- even though the WD Discovery tool was finding it every time, and I could now connect to the shares. So, I gave that up, and went looking for the Product Key. The screen said that could be found in the Quick Install guide -- but it wasn't there! I looked through the entire contents of my box, but it was nowhere to be found. Finally, another web search found the answer: once you register the drive with WD, there is a link to a "newer" version of the software which is pre-registered. Once I obtained this, everything started going smoothly. I was finally settling in and feeling happy about my purchase.

Then, about 45 minutes ago -- just four days after having received this drive from Amazon -- my heart sank.

All day long, I have been unable to connect to the drive. But, I've been busy, and didn't get a chance to investigate until this evening. The WD Discovery tool was telling me that my drive was there, but when I tried to access the shares, I'd get permission errors (as in, 'you don't have permission to access this share'). So, I tried the web interface, but was never able to connect. So, I rebooted the system. Still, no response via share nor web. Next, I just unplugged the darned thing, and left it unplugged for a few minutes. On plugging it in again, and waiting a few minutes, I can connect via the web interfaces -- but still not the shares! Then I get a few emails from the unit (I had turned on email alerts), informing me that, among a few other things: "Volume 'DataVolume' doesn't exist." In other words, my four-day old drive is DEAD! A quick search of the term I quoted above, along with the terms "Western Digital" and "My Book" yields one result, a page on WD's forum discussing that they, too, had recently had this problem with their My Book drives, and crying about WD's support -- or, rather, lack of it.

I'll give the support a try, but, if that doesn't pan out, I'll be returning this drive before it is a week old.

My advice would be to avoid this drive like the plague. I am really sorry to have to say this, since I am a WD fan. I have sworn by their drives for many years. I may have to explore other options, now.

----

Update (2010-02-16)

A bit of good news... I just got off the phone with WD's tech support. After having my issue escalated up the ranks, the last person with whom I spoke concluded that there were only two options available to me: reset the drive to its factory settings (which would wipe out all of my data) to see if the 'DataVolume' volume comes back, or return the drive to Amazon. I chose to restore to factory settings, and to my surprise, the 'DataVolume' volume did come back! I did lose my data from this unit, but, thankfully, I had the same data elsewhere, so all I've lost at this point is time. So, I'm in the process of backing up all of my data and copying important files to the unit -- again. Hopefully, this time, the volume will last.

This is my third Western Digital external drive, but my first ethernet network drive. It works great, all my Macs can utilize the MyBook World Edition at the same time and I love that even my PlayStation 3 can also wirelessly open files (music, photos, videos) from it. The 1TB is so much space to work with and I love how quiet it is compared to my old Ximeta NetDisk. The other thing which is great is that I was able to connect another external drive to this drive via USB port in the back. Western Digital to hard drives is what Apple is to computers--quality!!

It doesnt get a 5 simply because the software CD it came with did not work and actually crashed both my Mac and PC. Had to download from their website and go through several registrations steps, a bit annoying. Also the manual isn't that helpful and leaves a lot to desire. Besides that, it has worked great (so far perfect). It backs up all three of my laptops immediately after any document or files changes, it streams video effortlessly to my Apple TV (using XBMC/Boxee) and access to my files from work via Mionet has worked really well so far. So to wrap up, I am very happy with my purchase.

The Western Digital My Book World Edition is a great addition to the My Book family of external storage devices and offers consumers an extremely easy-to-use network storage solution. Simply plug it in, install the included software (only one-to-three clicks depending on how much you want to install) and you're ready to use this drive to share information on multiple computers.

The fact that average consumers now have a way to instantly backup their files without even thinking about it practically makes the My Book World Edition a "must have" accessory for the home or office. Being able to use this device as an iTunes server or for streaming video to a game console makes it great for home entertainment.

Although an eSATA drive would be faster for people who need extreme speed, wireless storage is far more advantageous for people with multiple computers.

Bottom line, the My Book World Edition is a fantastic stand-alone network drive that is easy to use and provides exceptional wireless transfer speeds. The Western Digital GreenPower drives used inside means the World Edition consumes significantly less power while delivering performance on par with power hungry network storage devices using 7200 RPM hard drives. Families or small offices with multiple laptops now have a simple way to make sure everyone has access to important files ... even if the hard drive inside your notebook or netbook is full.

Pros:
-- Extremely fast over a Gigabit Ethernet router
-- Simple setup and use makes this ideal for home and small office
-- Quiet (quieter than the Iomega NAS I used to have)

Cons:
-- White plastics look cool but might stand out in some homes or offices
-- Fast, but not as fast as a wired eSATA enclosure or internal SATA drive