Western Digital My Book World Edition 2 TB Network Attached Storage

by Western Digital

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 2.3 x 6.8 inches ; 2.4 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 4 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B001UHOR7O
• Item model number: WDH1NC20000N
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: March 25, 2009

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Centralized storage for everyone to share.

WD's My Book World Edition home network drive to makes it easy to store all your digital media in one central location so everyone in the family can have access to it. Simply connect the drive to your network router and you're up and running in just a few minutes. Store and share your media collection, back up data from any Mac or PC on your network, and stream media to your entertainment center. You can even view your stored photos with your iPhone.

Relax.
Centralized storage and backup for all the computers on your network.

Enjoy.
Stream movies, music, and photos to your entertainment center.

Escape.
Access your data anytime, anywhere. Show off your photos with your iPhone.

Features at a glance Store and backup photos, music, and video on your network Protect your files wirelessly with automatic, continuous backup Works seamlessly with both Windows® and Mac® computers Stream your digital media to your entertainment center View photos stored on the drive with your iPhone® or iPod® touch 3-year limited warranty

Simplified set up and best-in-class performance make the My Book World Edition home network drive the perfect choice for centralizing and backing up data on all the computers in your home.

Automatic and continuous backup for all the computers on your network - Now you can easily back up data from all your home computers with the included continuous backup software. Set it and forget it; every time you save something it's instantly and automatically backed up.

Simple file recovery - Restore lost, damaged or older files back to their original location with a couple of clicks. Backup files are stored in the same file structure that you originally saved them, so it's easy and intuitive to find files.

Centralize all your family's digital content - Store or backup all your digital files and media in one central location so everyone can access and enjoy your collection from any computer in the home.

Stream digital media anywhere in your home - Built-in media server for streaming music, photos and movies to any DLNA certified multimedia device such as Playstation® 3, Xbox 360®, wireless digital picture frames, and connected audio receivers. DLNA 1.5 & UPnP certified.

View your photo collection with your iPhone - Use your iPhone or iPod touch to get quick access to all the photos stored on your My Book World Edition home network drive. Download the free WD Photos photo viewer app and show off your entire photo collection without taking up tons of space on your iPhone or iPod touch.

iTunes® server support - Centralize your music collection and stream to a Mac® or Windows® PC using iTunes software.

Remote access - Access your files anywhere, anytime using MioNet remote access technology from WD.

Works seamlessly with both Windows and Mac computers - Access and save files seamlessly from both your Mac and your Windows computers.

Best-in-class performance - My Book World Edition uses cutting-edge technologies to deliver high performance read and write speeds ideal for the most demanding users.

Easy to set up, easy to find on your network - Set up is a snap; in just a few minutes you're up and running. Mac and Windows Vista computers will automatically find your My Book drive in seconds. Our simple discovery software makes it easy to find the drive with Windows XP systems.

Share your personal content - MioNet remote access technology makes it easy for you to securely share photos and documents with friends and family.

USB 2.0 utility port - Turn any USB drive into an instant network drive or extra capacity for your World Edition.

Cooler, quieter, eco-friendlier - Equipped with WD drives using WD GreenPower Technology, this system consumes significantly less power and delivers performance on par with power hungry network storage devices using 7200 RPM hard drives.

Capacity gauge - See at a glance how much space is available on your drive.

High-speed data transfer with Gigabit Ethernet - Gigabit networking and transfer rates are 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.

Ideal for

• Centralizing your photos, movies and music for everyone on the network to share
• Automatically backing up data from all the computers on your network to one location
• Seamlessly backing up and storing data from both Windows and Mac computers
• Streaming media to your entertainment center
• Retrieving files stored on the drive while at the office or traveling
• Accessing photos stored on the drive with your iPhone or iPod touch

What's in the box
Home network drive, ethernet cable, AC adapter, software CD, Quick Install Guide.

Compatibility
Windows XP/Vista, Mac OS® X Tiger®, Leopard®, Snow Leopard™.
Note: Compatibility may vary depending on user’s hardware configuration and operating system.

Product Description

Simplified set up and best-in-class performance make My Book World Edition Home Network Storage the easy choice for centralizing data and backing up your home computers. Connect the drive to your network router and you¿re up and running in minutes. Use the included back up software to protect your family¿s PCs with automatic and continuous backup plans. Store all your digital media in one central location so everyone in the family can have access to it. Compatible with both Mac and Windows files.

See all Product Description

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Budget NAS, but I'm happy with it after a couple of tweaks, May 12, 2010

By 

G. Farnsworth (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Western Digital My Book World Edition 2 TB Network Attached Storage (Personal Computers)

I bought the 2TB version of this (but not the version that has two physical drives). I'm not really all that interested in having the redundancy of RAID, weird programs backing up my computer when I'm not around, or software that allows me to connect to it remotely. I just want to throw my data on there from any one of the computers on my network and be able to get it off reasonably quickly, and I want it to go to sleep when I'm not using it. This drive does those things well.

I was looking for a drive that:

1. allows me to ssh in and tweak things by hand if I want
2. goes to sleep when not in use and wakes up without a problem
3. is cheap, quiet, and looks good
4. is fast enough for my needs
5. doesn't have any gotchas that impair its use significantly

In these respects this drive performs well.

The first thing I did when I got it was enable ssh, which you can do through the web menu. Then I logged in and disabled the mionet script. Mionet is the software that allows you to log in remotely, but it's apparently the buggiest and most wasteful program ever. You can supposedly disable this through the menu but it comes back on when you are not looking, so you actually need to physically go in and disable the startup script. I'm a linux guy so this was no problem. There are some howto's on the web that will tell you how to do this.

I played around with twonky, which is the software for playing media through UPnP. I think it's a cool idea, but the truth is that I have no need for it. I don't need/want to stream to anything but computers, and in that case it's easier to just map this drive and play the movie or song from that computer using my normal software. So I disabled twonky as well. It seemed to have a bunch of spawned processes, so this was probably a good thing. This also needs to be done through ssh.

I didn't install any of the software that comes on the CD's or anything. Apparently that software is crap anyway. I'm not sure what I would want it for. This drive works once you stick it on the network...no configuration necessary. I can get to the drive either by referencing its IP address or the hostname I gave it through the web interface.

The drive is silent and unobtrusive. The led white bar on the front slowly flashes on and off if it's sleeping and moves up and down if it's not. You can disable these leds through the web interface so it's even less obtrusive. I was worried that the sleep feature wouldn't work correctly but it works perfectly, which is one big plus about this drive. You don't notice it go to sleep because it's so quiet anyway, but it does after 15 minutes or something of not being used. Then when you try and read from it again it starts up quickly and there's no fuss. No need to turn it off or mess with it in any way, ever. Nice.

Performance is...pretty ok considering the type of device it is. According to the reviews I read, this drive is fast compared with others in its class. If you want something real fast, you have to pay up. Anyway, I have a gigabit network and I do realize you can't ever actually get the theoretical optimal speed. For reference (indicator of how good my network is or isn't), when I copy from one computer to another (both pretty fast computers) using SMB I get about 19.5 MB per second. When I use SMB to copy something onto this NAS I get about 10.8 MB per second. It's not as fast as copying to a computer, but I knew that going in. This is a powersaving and inexpensive device and both of those say it won't match performance of a fast computer with a PCI express gigabit connection. Anyway, when I read from it I get more like 16 MB per second or a little more. That's nearly as fast as a computer-to-computer copy. So I'm satisfied. I can certainly watch movies off of this drive directly without any skipping or anything. If you want a dramatic speed improvement over those, you can use ftp instead of smb (the latter just means mapping the network drive and copying to it through windows for those of you who may not know). I don't need the extra speed, though, and it's more of a hassle to use ftp, so I disabled the ftp server. Some day I may actually upgrade the SMB server the drive comes with. Apparently you can get a significant performance boost doing that but it's much more of a hack than the things I mentioned above. I don't want to risk screwing anything up in this drive now that it's working so flawlessly.

You can still remotely use this drive if you configure your router to pass http requests or ssh requests to it. No need for mionet. That's true of any computer that runs ssh and an http server. I would be crazy to sign up for some service to provide this capability. I didn't look closely at the twonky server, but I got the feeling that it would eventually want you to sign up for something as well. I shouldn't comment too much because I just disabled that garbage.

Things I don't do that apparently this drive can do:

1. Stream movies, pictures, or music to UPnP devices or Ipods
2. ftp, apple protocols
3. remote use using mionet
4. automatic backups
5. utilize an external USB hard drive
6. anything else besides just hold

so you will have to read other reviews for info about these features.

So yeah, I'm more techy than probably the average user, but the few tweaks I used weren't that significant. Since this drive allows ssh access, runs linux, and is popular enough that lots of people have it and have figured out how to tweak it, it's pretty easy to get working perfectly and there are plenty of howtos on the web. I'm real happy with it.

================
Edit: Instructions on how to do the tweaks I did are not available in the instructions. There are a number of sites on the web that describe how and why to do them. Just make sure your tweaks apply to the new "white light" version, which is this one. Some tweaks refer to the old "blue circle" version. Anyway this is what I did: First enable ssh through the web menu and ssh in as root. Default password is welc0me. Use these tips at your own risk obviously.

1. To disable mionet: First disable it through the web menu. Unfortunately the wakeup script will start it up again in 20 minutes or so because of a bug, so we fix it by editing /usr/mionet/monitorCVM.sh using vi. At the top (after the comments) add the following:

# Start of hack to make Mionet obey startup flag
if [ ! -f "/etc/.mionet_on_startup" ]; then
exit 1
fi
# End of hack to make Mionet obey startup flag

2. To disable twonky by moving its startup script to the root home directory:

mv /etc/init.d/S97twonkyserver ~

3. To disable mDNS responder by moving its startup script to the root home directory:

mv /etc/init.d/S9mDNSResponder ~

I disabled ftp through the web menu. There are other things that can be disabled or even upgraded but these are what make the difference and it all works for me. Reboot the NAS after making these tweaks.

If you do a "top" command before these tweaks you will see a number of processes dealing with these three features. After you will see that much less is running and when you copy to and from the NAS you will notice a performance boost. For security you can then disable ssh through the web menu if you want.
=========================

The manufacturer commented on the review belowSee comments

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Slow, slow transmission speed - not as advertised, November 12, 2009

By 

D. McClintock (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Western Digital My Book World Edition 2 TB Network Attached Storage (Personal Computers)

I bought this drive to use as network storage for video editing and multiple computer backups. Biggest problem I had was that it was exceedingly slow to transfer. It advertises Gigabit ethernet, but has an onboard processor that is 10-15 times slower, bottlenecking the entire process. I found it took me only 15 seconds to transfer 1GB from my laptop to desktop via ethernet (through my router), but it took 4.5 minutes to transfer the same 1 GB file to the MyBook World Edition located on the same router. I tried letting it sit overnight as I transferred 1TB of data to it - it stalled at 300GB when I found it the next morning.

Definitely not worth the money. I returned it and am looking for something better. I guess it's okay if you don't want to actually access or write to the drive often...

 

The manufacturer commented on this review(What's this?)

Posted on Feb 15, 2011 1:07:14 PM PST

Western Digital Technical Support says:

(MANUFACTURER)

We apologize for any inconvenience you are experiencing regarding the My Book World. Many factors such as network topology, wireless throughput, hardware and overall available bandwidth can hinder throughput of the device on any given network. With that in mind we would like to assist you in resolving any issue you are having with our product. This is not typical of our devices, and if you would like to contact us for further support, please visit:

http://support.wdc.com/rs/

Copy and paste the URL of this review where indicated and provide the requested information and one of our technical support staff will be contacting you regarding this issue.

You may also contact us at 1 [phone], or via our support website at:
http://support.wdc.com

Western Digital also has its own forums, WD Community. In the future, you may also want to consider posting your issues to our WD Community where you can interact with other WD customers. www.community.wdc.com

Permalink

 

 

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Buyer Beware - NO Support for Media Server on this unit!, September 17, 2009

By 

Richie Rich (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Western Digital My Book World Edition 2 TB Network Attached Storage (Personal Computers)

So I bought this primarily for the TwonkyMedia server built into this unit. I was so happy when it was delivered. The setup was a breeze, I named my unit on the network, copied all my movies and music to it, then let the TwonkeyMedia server scan all of the media on the drive. When it completed the scan and it built the media database, I ran to my new Sony Bravia XBR KDL-52XBR6 52-Inch 1080p 120 Hz LCD HDTV (also purchased from Amazon) and used the remote to see if I could play my movies from the TwonkyMedia Server. Both devices claim to be DLNA compliant. To my great disappointment, the TV was able to "see" the TwonkyMedia Server but said that there was no compatible media files found. (I know from the research that I did, that this was not accurate.) The problem was, the Western Digital "My Book World Edition" came with TwonkyMedia Server version 4.4.9 on it but the version that would work with my TV is 4.4.11. So I contacted TwonkyVision/TwonkeyMedia/PacketVideo and they won't support TwonkyMedia on NAS drives!!!! And Western Digital only has basic FAQ's on their site. At this point, I sit here without the ability stream my movies to my TV as was represented by Western Digital and Twonky.

I did not get what I a paid for as far as I am concerned. I looked at various websites that would guide you through upgrading the TwonkyMedia Server on the Western Digital My Book World Edition, but the catch is, if you "hack" into the Linux OS of the My Book and install the upgraded TwonkyMedia Server on it, you will lose your warranty from Western Digital. It totally sucks. This product puts the consumer in an bad place with no support for the third-party application. Since getting the "My Book World Edition", in August 2009, there have been two firmware releases that I anxiously applied while thinking it may also contain the upgrade of TwonkyMedia. But to no avail, it did not. Duped again....