WD MyBook World Edition Review
I’ve been looking for a network storage solution for some time to replace my uber-unreliable Netgear SC101. The Netgear initially sounded like a good proposition; empty NAS box that you could pick your own drives to pop into so you could have the space you needed and upgrade in the future. The reality was somewhat different. The device proved slow and unreliable (it could drop off the network at any moment) and the final nail in its coffin was Netgear’s instance that no one runs 64bit operating systems so they have no intention to create 64bit drivers. Now anyone that’s recently upgraded to Windows 7 knows, there is no reason to run 32bit Windows anymore; Windows 7 64bit is fantastic and runs just about everything.
My other requirement was for a device that could stream audio and video around my home network to the various PC’s Xbox360’s and PS3’s with as little hassle as possible.
After looking around the net I settled on a 1Terabyte Western Digital My Book World Edition. They seem a little hard to get hold of and last week it finally arrived.
Setup went as follows. Take out of box plug in power adapter; plug in Ethernet cable into router. I then went over to my main PC, selected Network from the Windows menu and there it was, my PC found it automatically. I then fired up the WD Discover utility and clicked map network drive and hey presto the default drives appeared. You can also see the MyBook as a computer on your network and map the drives manually. If you’re running a different operating system (other than Mac or Windows) you can also get the IP address of the drive and mount it too. To get into the device is also a doddle you see the drive as a storage device and by right clicking on it you see the option to view device webpage. This opens the admin page for the MyBook. The basic features allow you to setup users and also create more folders to share. Another very useful feature is the built-in Bit-Torrent downloader. This is accessed through the devices home page (by right clicking the device as outlined above) and selecting downloader. Once open you can enter a URL for HTTP downloads of open a torrent file, you can also then select where on the drive the file is downloaded to.
If all the above sounds too good then things just get better and better. The next step after copying some movies and photos onto the drive was to fire up my PS3 and then again the device is listed in the PS3’s Music, Movie and Photo viewer menu, you can then navigate through the folders on the Mybook and if you have all the MP3 ID tag on your files you can sort by artist, album and all the usual criteria. At this point I was getting a little excited and switched to the XBOX 360 and again the same experience, navigating to My Video’s again displayed the device and after a short interruption while the 360 downloaded and update to play MP4 video files I was watching video streamed over the network. All of this is courtesy of the MyBook’s DLNA compliance which allows networked audio and video devices to talk to each other as well as discover each other.
Performance is pretty good too writing to the drive is relatively speedy (I am running an 802.11n wireless network) and I’ve had several clients streaming at the same time with little in the way of pausing or hiccups. The next step was to attach a second drive to the MyBook this was also found automatically and I could create new network shares but also backup the internal drive to an external drive. The drive I have connected at the moment is not big enough to backup 1TB of data but is on the shopping list. One thing left to test is the MioNet remote access where you can access the drive from the Internet and allow others to. It’s not a full web server but it you want to upload data and give others access to files and photo’s it’s a good solution. Oh and if you’re a Mac user the MyBook supports Apple’s Time Machine backup software.
All in all the My Book World Edition gets a big thumbs up
