Western Digital My Book World Edition 1TB NAS box

Western Digital maintains that the stylised hardback design of its My Book external hard drives has proved really popular with the punters. But while it's extended the range to take in not just local storage but also network-connected drives, the latter haven't grabbed consumer attention as much as the others have. WD My Book …

[Nick Mallard]

Reliability

Let's just hope this isn't as absolutely shoddy and moronically firmware'd as the rest of the MyBook range. I wouldn't mind if they put hands up, admitted there was a serious problem and got on with fixing it but rather the "ignore it and it'll all go away" attitude prevails.

Shame really, I like WD hardware, just the MyBook range has suffered these issues for so long (network/NAS permissions related problems) that I'd be waiting for people to use these on-masse before I even considered buying. Wouldn't think twice about using one for USB connectivity though.

[Len Goddard]

What about the penguin

No linux support, or are linux users supposed to be sufficiently computer-literate to sort out the SMB shares themselves without any handholding?

[Graham Jordan]

Insert title here

I'm running two of the older MyBooks, it was bloody hard work getting Twonky on the damn things so its a welcome change having it built in.

Does the reg have a breakdown of hardware? What CPU and ram is it running? The older ones couldn't handle too much going off at the same time, it took 3 days to shift 500gb to a desktop machine once upon a time,

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll not convert me...

...from my Synology DS107+. It is simply the awesome. Without contest. Especially when you start messing with ipkg. It can do anything, I swear.

[Steve]

remote access

Did I misread the article or did it say "more on this later?"

[Daniel]

There is always conflicting information on these things

Any experience of how this performs with say....the PS3 or 360?

I'm looking to purchase a NAS but I can never get a definite answer. There is always something wrong with one of them!

Does the mybook use FAT32?

[Parax]

Looks nice on a desk - but better on a bookshelf

Yes any dvice without wires looks nice on a desktop..

Im a QNAPer and wont be converted.

[Anonymous Coward]

Power managament / Green features ?

Please will you make it a feature of all reviews of this kind of device to report on the green features of the drive: i.e. running power and standby power (if it offers such) and whether it can automatically power down and be woken up by WOL / appropriate network traffic.

A device using 20W of power consumes something of the order of £25 worth of electricity per year.

[Bad Beaver]

Is there...

... a model that adds FireWire?

[Nev]

Makes for a cheap FTP server too...

...Linux based. Bargain.

Just Google how to get SSH working on it and off you go....

[Sentry23]

Nice disk

But is there any way to find this thing on-line without mixing it up with the older version ?

The only place where I could find it was at the WD site, but every other webshop seems to sell the older version. (or at least still has the picture of the old version)

Paris, cause she also makes it impossible to find something with the same name.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fan, Heat, Noise?

A 5 page review but with no mention of heat or fan noise? Based on my previous experience of NAS devices, which is essentially an always-on box in the corner of your office, whether it's noisy or not is kind of an important thing to know.

[Bob Foster]

Linux

Looking at screenshots of the storage and network tabs on another review elsewhere it has both NFS and FTP options showing, so it looks like Linux boxes can access this without resorting to Samba.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hard work?!? Linux?!?!

I've got an older version MBW and there's quite a good hacking community out there, I got a telnet session up in less than 30 minutes after getting it out of the box and my Linux skills ain't that hot at all.

To Graham Jordan ... Hard work ... Really?! I just downloaded Twonky, ran the installer and Hey Presto ... A media server!

Almost as easy as installing a bittorrent client:

ipkg install transmission

[brimful]

@Christopher P. Martin

I have the DS407 :)

Awsome kit but a bit slow for unzipping files stored on the NAS.

[Francis O Reilly]

MyBook World Edition range: AVOID

If it's anything like the original models, the advice is STEER WELL CLEAR. Hopeless pile of junk, these. I had a 512MB MyBook World Edition. I bought it as it had a Linux distrib running it, and was fairly easy to hack, plenty of online instructions available. However, the hardware it ran on wasn't just mediocre, it was terrible. Not only did it have a permanently speed-crippled NIC (contrary to the marketing blurb touting its gigabit interface), but it had some hardware problem whereby the connection would frequently drop and need hard rebooting after trying to stream even modest amounts of data (few hundred MB). These problems were well documented and widely reported in the relevant forums.

[Anonymous Coward]

network speed limited again?

It sounds like they've kept the knobbled networking hardware ie the hardware is limited to less than 10Mb/s. I've got the older 500Mb version and I can only get approx 660Kb/s over a 100Mb connection via scp after hacking it to install the ushare xbox client. This would make the new version completety useless for HD streaming or any sort of production file server. What a waste.

[Scott Rader]

Significant Improvements Made

I thought I would stop by and update everyone on the improvements that we've made to the "New World". We knew there would be a comparison to the "Old World" so we put an extra emphasis on performance and added features our expert users were looking for.

Including:

Auto Discovery on Vista and Mac

DLNA 1.5 / UPnP Media Server (TwonkyMedia)

iTunes Server

FTP Server

Email Alert System for critical events

Quota Management

SSH Enabled

Remote Web Access with access and sharing of your personal content

CIFS/SMB, AFP, and NFS support

We hope you like the improvements... I know I do :)

-ScottWD

[zenkaon]

These things are great

I've got an older (6 months old) 1TB version and they are great. Plug it into your router and you have a wifi hard disk with access anywhere in the world, providing you have set up your network properly.

The older version (mine) has a 500MHz ARM processor with 32MB of RAM, this limited the transfer rates, so hopefully this new version has a more powerful chip looking at el reg's benchmarks.

These things run Linux, check out:

http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/hacks-and-howto

I have mine fully AES encrypted (the big partition, not /) and setup as an nfs server, samba server, UPnP media server, printer server, rsync server. I can happily play 5 different films at the same time on a wired PC and 4 wireless laptops with no pause or skips. Need more laptops to fully stress test it.

Once you have ssh access these devices are a hackers dream, you can fool around with them to your hearts content. Nice community on the wikidot forums as well.

I haven't had any problems with connectivity like other are reporting. Set your router to assign the thing a static IP address, make sure everything is on the same workgroup if your using windows. NFS is still faster and nicer.

[Jiminy Krikett]

Who, in their right mind?

....is going to store TWO TERABYTES worth of data on a single disc? Fuck that for a game of soldiers!

[Anonymous Coward]

@brimful

Unzipping...? Surely if you have the 4-disk array zipping can be a thing of the past! What you got in there- 4TB (dribble...)? 500Mhz CPU and 128MB ram is good to go for most things, but I guess CPU-intensive zipping/unzipping of big data will test it a little. Access speed is great with the gigabit LAN though- I can stream HD from it no trouble. Almost as fast as a local drive in my tests.

[zenkaon]

@Scott Rader

Hey Scott, are you a WD guy?

I assume you've kept with ARM chip. What does it clock at?

How much RAM is there?

What kernel are you using?

[Scott Mckenzie]

Looks Interesting

I had an old 'My World" and it was rubbish, twi failures that required new units to be supplied... but the stand alone drives are fantastic, i have 3 of them in various locations and they've been faultless!

The specs look good on this, I have to say.... but now i've built an HTPC i'll just buy the disc instead!

I would be interested to hear if anyone has any experience streaming to a PS3 though as the neighbours are after something similar!

[rare uk]

Availability

@Sentry23, search for WDH1NC10000, there's not much out there and the only place I found it in said "Available in about 28 days"

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Significant Improvements Made

Scott, if you're going post this exact same sales blurb in several hardware review sites then please try and tailor your posts to address the gripes users have had with this particular piece of hardware rather than reiterate the basic sales pitch.

I'm particularly referring to the rate-limited network interface which prevents people from getting the full advertised network speed from the hardware after they've purchased it. This is something that burnt quite a few users after they purchased the previous version of the My Book World.

If this is fixed in the new version then you've got yourself a convert, otherwise this is just the same hardware with a bigger drive and updated software, which is something users can upgrade themselves using the right linux tools and an el cheapo spare drive.

[Anonymous Coward]

WD's perf figures

Tom's hardware seem to have missed a trick in not conducting their own full wired Ethernet perf tests, but the (WD supplied) file transfer and IOzone perf charts look pretty good:

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/westerndigital-mybook-worldedition,review-1200-8.html