WD My Book® World Edition™ Review

I already have 4 months since I have decided to purchase an network storage (Ethernet). My idea was to create a file repository and use it remotely through VPN when I’m working outside the office, and to be able to share the files with my team mates. It was a really good assumption that this device will satisfy my needs and here I’m talking about the WD My Book® World Edition™ http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=278. But in short time it turns out that my assumption was real bad one and here I will explain why. From the beginning I have to mention that I had deactivated the WD Anywhere Access – a very annoying application - since this is a way to access your files remotely through a tunneling technology, problem solved by accessing my network trough a VPN connection.

 

1. The web interface is very poor and slow, and you can do nothing about it. I could get used to it, since I will have to configure the device one time, and put it somewhere under my desk.
2. The Ethernet throughput of the device is ONLY 2-3 MBps. The maximum speed that I had for this device was 3.3 MBps. And this is real slow since the drive comes with 500GB, 750GB or 1TB HDD and you are thinking to use this space somehow. Probably I could get used with this aspect also.
3. But the thing that I couldn’t get used with is the fact that after a while, 1-2 days, the device couldn’t be accessed via the Network Neighborhood in Windows (probably the Samba client gets stuck) so you CAN NOT access the files and a restart of the device will be needed.   

Now I’m convinced that I cannot use this device as active network storage and since the human being is a very adaptive living creature, I also got used with this. But I have to use it somehow, or my wife will give me another “big stupid silly guy” appellative. So, I decided to use it for backup purposes and backup all my data and my wife’s laptop on this “very nice looking” WD external storage. Now let’s start copying my pictures and music files on it… something like 180GB… hmmm…. No luck so far. After copying like 500MB, I’m getting a writing protection failure. I tried to restart the copy process, wait a moment a try again but still no luck. Ok, I said, then probably the restart magic will solve the issue and indeed, the restart of the device solved my issue. Now I’m trying to resume the copy process and hope that this f**king write protection failure will not rise again. While copying the file at the incredible speed of 2.6MBps, my beautiful Windows XP Pro working station is throwing the same error. What a pity. Where are the WD guys that were making those very good hard disks?

 

In the end, what was my escape? I removed the 500 GB hdd from the device and put it into my PC.

 

Conclusion:

Q: What is the most expensive way for purchasing a regular 3.5” HDD?

A: Buy a WD My Book World Edition.