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Let me put that in concrete terms: Uploading a one hour video to the NETStora takes 7 to 14 seconds; uploading to the My Book takes 5 MINUTES.3. But let me be specific:1. The drive is SLOW; UNBELIEVABLY, PAINFULLY slow. Coyne, I don't know what kind of product design review process your company uses; but read the reviews and I think you'll have to conclude that something is BADLY BROKEN at Western Digital's engineering and product development operations. A Gigabyte of RAM is cheap compared to the cost of this device, and might overcome some of the glaring design problems.8.
Slower than writing to a Flash Memory Card or USB Disk. The MIONET application is a joke. Slower than uploading to the internet. If you've stopped accessing the drive for more than a few seconds, it spins down -- to save power, I guess. The My Book often could not get above 1Mb per second. I'd encourage you, Mr. There are many ways to access storage remotely that do not require paying for a service to provide proxy access.6. Slower than writing to a DVD-ROM.
What I received was without any doubt the WORST drive I've ever had or heard of. The spin-up time is abysmal. industry, very technical, and very experienced in storage technologies -- including Network Attached Storage.From a name like WESTERN DIGITAL, I expected a top of the line product: I certainly paid a top of the line price for it. The "reboot" time for the drive is 5 - 10 times longer than any other NAS device I've worked with: even Windows reboots faster.7.
Using the same computer and network interface, I can write to other NAS devices (like the NetGear NETStora) at 25MB to 50MB per second, even once the target disk buffer is full. When more than one user attempts to read from the device, it slows from a crawl to a squirming pace that makes glacier speeds look fast.4. The device is essentially unmanageable without the My Book applications installed. I'm a 31 yr veteran of the I.T. But when you try to access it again it takes over 10 seconds to spins the drives up and accept data. At the very least, WESTERN DIGITAL should provide a large RAM buffer on the controller to offset the spin-up time. Despite the claim that the My Book is green (low-power consumption), the heat dissipation of the drive is very high.I hope John Coyne, Western Digital's President, takes time to read these reviews. Mr.
Coyne, to make sure that Western Digital's management team and impressive Board of Directors uses Western Digital's new products DAILY for several weeks before you allow them to be launched. The drive CANNOT be used as a local drive; i.e., you cannot connect it to your computer even if it's not connected to the network at the same time.2. I have to believe that your personal use of this would have led to terse and blunt nastygram to the MyBook product development team. The drive is useless as a shared storage device. Many other devices provide a web interface that can be easily used to administer NAS drives from a browser without any special software involved -- even a mobile phone.5. This product should never have been released. The computing public expects more of Western Digital and they deserve more than this shoddy device can provide.Mike Chambers
The trouble comes when trying to use the Mionet interface which allows access from remote locations via the web. As far as network attached storage goes, this unit is adequate. The Samba interface works well on the internal network, though a little slow. This arrangement precludes direct access to the unit locally, so whenever Mionet loses connection, the unit is inaccessable locally. Neat idea, but very poor architecture.On the local network, I have some trouble with the IP address changing and haven't been able to get the static IP to work yet.just DHCP.
The world access software does cost 50.00 dollars a year but this isn't different than software such as Norton (60.00/ year), navigation subscriptions (Garmin is 60.00 / year) and many other software which come out with new versions each year. I'm very surprised to read here that people talk find this drive's fan loud.
I'm running one laptop on Windows XP, Home Edition, one with Windows Vista - Home Edition and my desktop with Windows XP - Home Edition. I did not have any problems with networking either of the two types of operating systems and have the WD set as a network drive for all three computers.
I'm using this in my household to have a central location to access files for two laptops and one desktop. The software which comes with the drive (Backup Anywhere) was a bit of a pain to install but it's not necessary to install for the harddrive to function.
I don't find moving files over to this drive slow at all and the speed is comparable to moving files over to my C drive. This network drive is much faster than storage drives which are connected via USB.
I keep mine in the living room and never hear it so maybe I'm one of the lucky ones.
The interfaces seem straightforward enough and installation again was simple.If you are into these things, there is a good sized home-brew community which has brought out all kinds of neat functionality such as installing a bit torrent client directly on the drive, allowing you to bypass your PC. I find these drives strike the right balance (for me) of function (drive size, speed, ease of use), design (compact, looks good on a shelf, quiet) and price (one of the cheapest, quality NAS out there). This is my second Western Digital My Book World Edition II External Hard Drive. As with any device you are always trading what is most important to you against what you can afford. I love the idea of removing the issue of storage off a PC so that I can access my data anywhere, anytime from anything without my PC being on.I use these drives to stream DVDs to two XBoxes converted into media players. I can stream to two media servers at the same time, and write to the drive (say uncompress a large file).The drives come with software for archiving and remote access, however, this is something I've only examined in a cursory way. If I paid more, a lot more actually, I'd get a NAS that would allow additional drives, or run quieter, or have a smaller footprint. To me, this NAS offers a good balance at the right price.
This product is great when set up as a Raid mirrored 1 TB storage drive. I did many hours of research before purchasing this product. I am primarily using the drive to store a photo library. I had also decided prior to purchase that I was not going to install the MioNet software as I have no desire to use remote network access. I decided to use the Windows' built in networking capabilities which works just fine for my needs.Set up was easy and the drive is not as loud as others have mentioned.
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