WD Introduces My Book World Edition II 1TB External Hard Drive

[malware]

Expanding its lineup of consumer-friendly, easy-to-use external hard drives that has made it the leading consumer external storage brand worldwide, Western Digital Corp. today introduced the My Book World Edition family of shared storage appliances. This new family of shared storage appliances allows consumers and home office workers to securely access their digital content, such as photos, home videos and documents, and share it with family and friends from anywhere in the world as if that content were stored local to the user. The terabyte (TB) My Book World Edition II model is equipped with a dual-drive configuration and RAID capability.





WD Anywhere Access is WD's new software for simplifying access to digital content and breaking the barriers of physical proximity to that content. Part of Anywhere Access is the unique Data OnHand feature, which makes My Book World Edition active in Windows Explorer and Windows "Save As" and "Open" options whenever the user is connected to the Internet. This streamlines access to the content for users, even if they are thousands of miles away from their My Book World Edition appliance, and eliminates task-heavy logging into and out of third-party Web access systems. It operates independently of any specific PC, so the original host computer does not need to be powered on.

"The My Book World Edition shared storage appliances eliminate the limits of traditional external hard drives," said Jim Welsh, vice president and general manager of WD's Branded Products group. "Using this appliance is like carrying as much as a terabyte of content with you wherever you go and knowing that your personal content is safe at home. This new concept in storage enables virtually limitless accessibility to family, friends and associates for sharing and backup."

In a new twist on today's popular social networks, the My Book World Edition enables friends and family to share digital content such as photos and documents anywhere in the world without the hassle or insecurity of having to upload it to a third-party Web site. Road warriors will appreciate the ease with which they can retrieve an important presentation and other documents from their My Book World Edition while traveling, as well as the ability to remotely back up their laptop/notebook data to their My Book World Edition. Small workgroups can easily share critical documents over the Internet or within a local network without the need for a separate, and often cumbersome, FTP server.

The two models of the My Book World Edition family of shared storage appliances are compatible with wired and wireless networks and equipped with a lighted on/off button; easy-to-use backup software; a unique capacity gauge LED that allows users to discern at a glance remaining storage space; and a three-year limited warranty. They come with EMC Retrospect Express backup software; one Ethernet port; one USB 2.0 port to instantly add more storage; intelligent drive management features and LED activity lights. The My Book World Edition model has a capacity of 500 GB. My Book World Edition II includes all of the features of the My Book World Edition product in a dual-drive system for 1 TB of capacity.

Extra Data Protection
My Book World Edition II units are shipped in the full 1 TB configuration, but can be set by users to reserve half of its capacity to mirror users' data in real time using RAID 1.

The My Book World Edition II is user-serviceable, allowing users to open the enclosure to replace one or both of the hard drives by following the detailed instructions, without voiding the system's three-year limited warranty.

Availability and Pricing
The My Book World Edition family is available beginning this week at select retail stores, online retailers and in the United States directly from WD at www.westerndigital.com. Suggested retail price is $499 USD for My Book World Edition II. Suggested retail price is $279 USD for My Book World Edition 500 GB.

A 3-D view and more information on the My Book family of external storage products can be found at www.wdmybook.com.

Source: WD

[Alcpone]

Well if a Tb is 1024Gb, which I guess it is.. My entire wma collection will take up 4.69% and if I listened to the whole collection from start to finish, 24 hours a day, it would take a solid 29 days to go through of pure audio heaven Soooo... my conclusion is this sucker is biggg ...

[WarEagleAU]

Real big. I mean, if you could, you could potentially use this as a hard drive for your OS. This is huge and actually pretty damn cheap.

[Completely Bonkers]

Networking... good. Last MyBook was a USB/Firewire thingie. Linkstation was still a winner in this market due to ability to stick it in a network.

However, are permissions properly managed on the WD?

And how noisey/hot does this thing get. The early linkstations were silent... but the more recent gigabit ones were a bit noisey... esp. the cooling fan.

[Steevo]

$500 for a TB of storage?


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822144016


4=2TB of storage, or 1.25 of RAID 5.

[Completely Bonkers]

$500 is initial retail. I'm sure after a few months it will be $400. And $400 is a good price for NAS device

[Scavar]

Originally Posted by Steevo

$500 for a TB of storage?


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822144016


4=2TB of storage, or 1.25 of RAID 5.

Yeah but thats a Maxtor....and its not external


It's a pretty good price for what it is.

[gerhard]

Ok,

I purchased the 1TB (two "500" GB) drive unit last weel.

I then started to attempt to use the unit.

You can ONLY connect to the MyBook World Ed II via ethernet. In my case, everything is 1000BaseT, so there are no problems there. (I'm not using a Cisco 6509 like I have at work, but it's a 1000BaseT network all the same.)

When I noticed that it was difficult to connect to the MyBook, and that I was getting write errors to the device, I decided to try some benchmarks.

The first thing I noticed is that you pretty much have to map a drive letter to the device using an IP address. If you use the \\mybook\ nomenclature, you will get write errors...

I then performed a full Windows backup to my home network server, and it took about 80 minutes to backup 78GB to that file server.

After that, I tried the MyBook World Edition II, and it took about 270 minutes.

The device performs horribly. I'm fairly certain that Firewire 800 would have been signifantly faster.

The other big issue, aside from the "it doesn't really work well" one, is that the documentation for the product is horrible. It's a 1000BaseT product, but they don't even tell you the basic things like "Does it support jumbo frames..." Basically, the docs are devoid of any technical user information.

Lastly, their support site has no information available on this product.

I'd stay away from it...

[gerhard]

Originally Posted by Completely Bonkers

Networking... good. Last MyBook was a USB/Firewire thingie. Linkstation was still a winner in this market due to ability to stick it in a network.

However, are permissions properly managed on the WD?

And how noisey/hot does this thing get. The early linkstations were silent... but the more recent gigabit ones were a bit noisey... esp. the cooling fan.

Oh... yeah... THIS THING IS LOUD!

It's louder than the quad Opteron box with the 8800GTS card, 5 hard drives, and 4 fans sitting right next to it.

LOUD!

[Jj24]

Hi guys,

just bought World Edition 2... just like to correct some things that were said on the forum :

first the noise is totally absent. I'm writing full speed on it since 1 hour now and I swear I can't hear it at all, unless I stick my ear right on the drive, so this was false, I'm totally satisfied with the noise and maybe you got unlucky or have a bad fan I don't know...

For the speed, I just transfered 7 gigs in 20 minutes, so that's not completely crazy but I'm personaly Ok with that speed, considering I'm passing through a 100 mbps router, I don't know if it could get faster with a faster router...

For the write errors, I just transfered 7 gigs with the //mybook/ nomenclature and it works fine; did not need to map by an IP address. CRC of this whole 7 gigs is OK. however I didn't test as much as some of you; maybe it will get hotter and start making errors, I'll see that later...

There's 1 thing that really frustrated me : the software suite is not vista 64-bits compatible. Now I learned that just when trying to install them. I was lucky I found a way to include the drive as a network drive using vista itself, however if the software is important for you, keep in mind that it is not compatible with vista 64. Now I tried the software on my wife's XP 32-bits and it's just ridiculous so in the end It's a good thing it was not compatible. The guys that made this little software had in mind the idea to give you access to your drive anywhere in the world, and they use a central identification server for this; they basically reinvented FTP and when I see this kind of software I'm not happy... why not use the old protocols that are pretty good already, why absolutely cover all this file transfer this with java environnements and things you need to install etc.... So in the end I don't care about the software, but I'm still totally frustrated against WD to not take care of its clients with vista 64 bits I mean any serious company should consider from now on to offer all its products compatible with vista...

Despite that I'm totally satisfied with the drive itself, sorry gotta go fill this monster!

Jj24