Western Digital My Book World Edition

Out of the box and connect to your network hub and your up and running. Many tools for basic and advanced features/controls. PS3 picks right up as media server. Hope it lasts a long time without failing.… Although it comes with a backup website, I would have gone with the Book World II set up to mirror each 1T drive in case of failure. Next purchase will be the BWII. Worth the extra $100.00 to have a backup drive.

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It's a 1TB drive attached to an ARM processor running Linux with BusyBox ([...]). You can use it as a cute little server for anything that doesn't need a lot of RAM or processor power! I have mine set up… to automatically download anything I could ever want and have new files waiting for me before I even know they exist! Step 1: Enable SSH Step 2: Install a package manager Step 3: Set up your linux environment, dig into /etc/init.d and kill all the cruft they have running in memory by default (mionet, twonky, whatever else you don't need) Step 4: Install new daemons to handle tasks in the background. Step 5: Enjoy a tiny, quiet, low-power server that does what you need! My only complaints: - Even with a lot of memory freed up, it can still be unresponsive from time to time. I have the feeling that one of the share-related daemons is occasionally running a task that takes forever to finish. As a result I'll often see my shell lock up for 10-20 seconds every few minutes. Annoying and can probably be fixed with some detective work. - Getting Mionet disabled was a serious pain. Removing references to it from init.d actually wasn't enough--I couldn't figure out what was firing it off and had to actually move its files aside completely. Killing this was my biggest performance gain, as it spins up a bunch of java processes that chew up a ton of memory. - The LAN-public directories default to public read/write/delete. Do not expect zero setup time if you don't trust everyone on your LAN--you'll need to set up a private share or other restrictions to keep a housemate from deleting your stuff. For tips on all of the above, MyBookWorld ([...]) is an excellent resource. Give it a look if you're having trouble figuring out where to start. Even with that site as a guide, however, I don't recommend digging in unless you're somewhat comfortable with linux administration. It is very possible to brick your device by killing the wrong files in /etc/init.d, so watch your step. Enjoy!

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I bought this drive to use as network storage for video editing and multiple computer backups. Biggest problem I had was that it was exceedingly slow to transfer. It advertises Gigabit ethernet, but has… an onboard processor that is 10-15 times slower, bottlenecking the entire process. I found it took me only 15 seconds to transfer 1GB from my laptop to desktop via ethernet (through my router), but it took 4.5 minutes to transfer the same 1 GB file to the MyBook World Edition located on the same router. I tried letting it sit overnight as I transferred 1TB of data to it - it stalled at 300GB when I found it the next morning. Definitely not worth the money. I returned it and am looking for something better. I guess it's okay if you don't want to actually access or write to the drive often...

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Easy to follow instructions, and plugged into my wireless easy, but that is when a little known flaw came into play. As I first plugged it in, my computer gave a "duplicate IP address error" and couldn't… find it on the network. Then, my entire network became unavailable. Talked with both Linksys (my wireless router company) and Western Digital support. Both said there was a know flaw with this model: sometimes when plugged into wireless networks, there is an IP conflict which can cause all the settings of the router to be reset! Both technicians were aware of this from past cases. To me, this seems to be something that ought to have a big red warning label.... Once this was fixed, the unit works ok. Wireless transfer speed is quite slow - 100gig of backup took 22 hours. However, the continuous backup works great, and it's easily accessable from the 3 PC's in our house, no issue with streaming media or concurrent access.

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