Western Digital has introduced a new high-capacity external drive for Mac and Windows computer users. The My Book World Edition II is a dual-drive network attached storage (NAS) system offering as much as 4 terabytes of storage. The Western Digital My Book World Edition II uses a RAID 1 configuration to safely store data on two separate drives. If one drive fails, photos, videos and other data will be protected on the mirror drive.
Photographers need lots of digital storage – even a casual photographer can quickly accumulate hundreds of gigabytes of photos these days. Losing photos because of a drive failure is unacceptable. Network attached storage (NAS) devices like the WD My Book World Edition II used to be mysterious boxes managed by IT professionals for companies that had to store tons of critical data. Guess what? Photographers have huge amounts of critical data to store. And NAS devices have come a long way in the past couple of years. The WD My Book World Edition II is about the same size as a standard high-capacity USB drive and installation and there’s no need for a computer programming degree to set up your drive. And since it’s a NAS device, not only does it store and back up your photos (or videos, iTunes library, etc.), it also makes them available through a network – or even remotely with the included MioNet remote access software and an Ethernet connection.
The new WD My Book World Edition II is available now in 2 and 4 GB versions for $399.99 and $699.99, respectively.
Official WD My Book World Edition II Press Release
Official WD My Book World Edition II Web Page
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Official WD My Book World Edition II Web Page
Western Digital Web Site
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You have the capcity listed as 2 and 4 Gb, instead of Tb. Small, but critical, mistake when reviewing devices like this.
I have the WD Worldbook 1TB drive for over a year. It is worthless! Here are the reasons:
- The MioNet software is full of problems. I spent more time reinstalling, rebooting, trouble shooting random errors than actually using the drive. Currently I can’t even access the drive for an unknown reason. I was scared to death that I lost the data. Fortunately, for some unknown reasons, I can access the drive using another computer.
- It is very, very, very slow. If you think buying this large capacity drive to put lots of files on it, you are dead wrong. Yes, you can write tons and tons of data on the drive. The problem is that it takes a very long time to do that – to the point that it is not usable. WD told me that the transfer rate for these drives is 3 to 5 megabits per second. That means you can only transfer about 37kb per minute to the drive. Base on that fact, it would take 47+ years to fill a 1TB drive. Now, that was what WD support told me. My experience is that I can transfer at a significantly higher rate than 3 to 5 mbps; however, it still took me over two hours to transfer 2.3 GB of data on 16,000 files to the drive.
- Availability is a big issue. As you may have already know, you need MioNet central server to verify who you are before you can access the drive. The problem is that MioNet seems to not be available during the late night hours; perhaps they shut down to do maintenance. That also happen to be the time that I can spare to do this sloooowww, looooong back up to the Wordbook drive. With this lack of availability at night, my back up would fail in the late hours. Now I have a situation where I can’t reliability back up at night. I can’t back up during the day because I need the laptop to do work.
- Getting your data from the drive is a probelm also. If you were successful putting a ton of data on the drive, you will have a heck of a time access to that back up data. You will have that same slow transfer rate and low / intermittent accessibility to the drive.
- A constant fear of the backed up data can disappear. While trouble shooting the problem with a WD support person, he concluded that the drive is bad and I should reformatt or replace it. This was a horror scenarior for me – loosing the only back up of my data. Fortunately I did not take the advice – and through hours and hours of tinkering, I was able to determine that my data is still intact – because, by accident, I was able to access the drive and the data using another laptop. Now I am paranoid about this drive and started looking for alternative solution.
How is that for great engineering and great reliability! Look somewhere else for a solution. Don’t look at western digital worldbook and you will save yourself a lot of frustration, a lot of time, not mentioning saving the money from buying something that has a high chance of becoming nothing more than an expensive paper weight.
To “Not Pleased”: you don’t know what you are talking about.
A speed of 3-5 Mbits/s doesn’t translate to 37KB/min.
Learn how to use a calculator:
1 Mb/s = 1024Kb/s = 1KB/s = 60 KB/min
so 3-5 Mb/s = 180 KB/min – 300 KB/min.
Now that we have the numbers done, it is not true the MyBook gets that transfer speed. Since you obviously can’t tell the difference between 1 MB and 1Mb, it’s very likely they told you the drive can get 3-5 MB/s instead (about 8 times faster than 3-5 Mb/s).
Even that is not true. I have transferred files to the drive at about 7.2 MB/svia FTP. Slow for anybody with a Gigabit connection but acceptable for those of use who still use a 10-100 Mb router.
The drive has its problems, no doubt but there’s no need to make up stuff.
I bought this drive oner or two years ago with a gigabit switch.
also i have since about 3 year a buffalo linkstation pro.
i can tell u that i am able to transfer data to the buffalo 6 times faster then to the WD.
Believe it or not. The WD NAS System is bullshit!