Product Description

Storage System for Remote Access and Sharing. Designed for home users, creative professionals, workgroups, small offices and anyone looking for shared storage, WD's My Book World Edition II offers a surprisingly simple and secure way to access and share data, pictures, and music at home, in the office and anywhere in the world - even when your local computer is turned off. The dual-drive network storage system combines 1TB of storage, versatile RAID capability, backup software, user-serviceability, and remote access software to make it the most versatile and powerful remote access storage syste in its class.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34955 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Western Digital
• Model: WDG2NC10000N
• Dimensions: 9.00" h x 6.75" w x 11.50" l, 7.10 pounds
• Hard Disk: 500GB

Features

• Simple and secure way to access and share data at home, in the office, and anywhere in the world
• Data on the hard drive is accessible even when your local computer is off
• Extra data protection with RAID 1
• High-performance 1000/100/10 compatible Ethernet connection
• Easy to set up, easy to use

From the Manufacturer
Add this unique remote-access storage system to your wired or wireless network and you’ll have a surprisingly simple and secure way to access and share data and photos at home, in the office, and anywhere in the world--even when your local computer is off. The included RAID software makes it easy for you to take advantage of RAID mirroring for extra data protection.

Product Features

WD Anywhere Access - This storage system and all the files on it are always accessible when you need them, even when your local computer is turned off.

Easy to set up, easy to use - You’re up and running in a few simple steps. Wizard software steps you through RAID configuration and network setup is a breeze with our unique, powerful remote access software.

Data OnHand - From any PC, use Windows Explorer to securely browse through folders on My Book World Edition. Open, edit and save files as though they are right there with you.

Extra data protection with RAID 1 - For extra data protection, dedicate half the capacity for mirroring, and automatically and instantaneously back up data every time you save it.

Extraordinary capacity - With one terabyte (1,000 GB) of storage in this elegant, small footprint design, you have plenty of room to store an entire digital photo library, up to 120 hours of HD video, or up to 76 hours of Digital Video (DV)

User serviceable - Easy access allows you to open the case and replace a drive. No need to send the entire system in for service.

Gigabit Ethernet Connection - High-performance 1000/100/10 compatible Ethernet connection.

EMC Retrospect Express backup software - Easy-to-use software for scheduled or on-demand file backup.

UPnP enabled - Makes network configuration easy and convenient.

Capacity gauge - See at a glance how much space is available on your storage system.

Quiet and cool - An efficient convection cooling system and a thermostatically controlled fan keep this unit reliably cool and remarkably quiet.

Use This Product When You Want To

• Securely access and edit your files on any computer.
• Get files from home while at the office.
• Listen to the music on your My Book World Edition drive while you’re on vacation.
• Securely share photos with your friends anywhere in the world without uploading them to the web.
• Back up your laptop data to your home computer while you’re traveling.
• Offer your clients an easy way to access business documents, designs, and artwork. Eliminates the need for a separate FTP server.
• Back up critical files to a remote drive for the ultimate protection from loss.
• Simplify your home network and access data from any computer or external hard drive in the house.
• Automatically back up all your PCs to one central location.
• Gain peace of mind with a mirrored back up of important documents and images.

Customer Reviews

This drive does EXACTLY What It Says It Will
I have several other Western Digital MyBook directly attached drives and am very happy with them. This drive was purchased by a friend (at my suggestion) and sent to me for setup.

The installation instructions do leave a lot to be desired. I had to go to the WD Knowledge Base support website to find out how to reformat the drive into a raid 1 drive. Once I figured out that you MUST install the included software before you try and do ANYTHING everything went quite well. The drive reformatted without incident in about the five hours WD said it would take.

The next process was copying a 150GB drive from my directly connected MyBook drive to the World Edition. This takes about 2 hours on my directly connected drives. It takes about 8 - 9 hours with a gigabit ethernet connection from the computer through the router to the World Book. While this is a long time, it is not something that will be done more than once (especially with the raid 1 formatting.) After this the World Book functions like my other directly connected MyBook drives.

Because the World Book is an ethernet device attached to a router it is not necessary to have your computer running to access the drive. It is probably advantageous to not leave your computer on with no one around to deal with any problems that my arise while you are not there for an extended period.

What is special about the World Book is the Always Connected software it comes with. This allows anyone with a high speed internet connection to access files on the drive from anywhere. This particular drive will be accessed from Costa Rica for several weeks each year.

Do not discount the advantage of having all of your information in one place. No synchronization problems. No duplicates. No worry about sensitive information being moved around or more importantly, lost.

I would have rated the World Book higher if the instructions supplied by Western Digital were better. For someone without much computer experience, I can see twhis being a bit of a bear to install. If WD fixes the instructions, I would rate the World book 4 stars. AS IT IS, DO NOT BE AFRAID TO USE THE WD Knowledge Base for help. It is clearer than the supplied instructions.

If you must buy this make sure it is easily returned...
This unit does not support long path names. After each daily automated backup I saw a hyperlinked error message however nothing happened when clicked on. So after 7 days I tried a restore to a different computer and discovered that less than one-third of the files were being backed up.

I called WD tech support whose only solution was to use shorter pathnames. This was not acceptable and not even an option due to the software I use in particular AutoCAD.

I asked WD tech support why the Retrospect software did not report the error, there was no answer. I asked if there was an error log I could look at to see what the errors were, after checking with others on the support team I was told there was none.

No doubt my experience is colored by the lackluster performance of the particular person who 'helped' me ... who asked me to run chkdsk and comprehensive disk diagnostics all of which I believe had nothing to do the problem.
Putting all that aside I think the concept of a mirrored hard disk backup that can be remotely accessed via the Internet is nothing short of brilliant. I had no trouble with the Mionet remote access software, it was fairly intuitive and easy to follow. But the Retrospect software that 'came with' is very limited, for example you can only schedule one automated back up. Even Handy Backup which I've used for years allows multiple schedules. As the WD tech support person said this software 'was not very good' and was simplified from older software to make it more user friendly. He added that the older software was still available and that they had nothing else to offer.

Otherwise it installed easily and we did not find the noise objectionable on the unit we had. Certainy it is a lot quieter than any of our Dell Workstation drives.

Fortunately I had bought this unit from Dell which made returning it a breeze, I am now looking to possibly a Buffalo or Maxtor unit with Cobian Backup (freeware) or similar after reading PC Magazines articles by Bill Machrone.

What good is a NAS if you can't access the files remotely?
As an external disk drive that you use attached to your local machine, the drive will serve your needs well. But if, say, you wanted to use this drive as a NAS for a network of any size, this drive fails miserably.

Why is that?

This drive includes mandatory DRM features that make it impossible for more than one user to access certain files. Among these files are video files. It doesn't matter if you created the files yourself; if the file fits within the pre-defined scope of what is "banned from sharing" you're not going to get the file. Back to SneakerNet... or you can "fool" the drive by naming your file from file.avi to file.avi.txt... but why is this necessary? For what am I buying a NAS for if I have to jump through hoops?

Complete waste of money. There are other NAS solutions on the market that are loads better than don't come saddled with mandatory DRM installed into the firmware of the device.