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Western Digital My Book World Edition review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £139
inc VAT

Specifications

1 disk bays, 1TB storage supplied, 1x 10/100/1000Mbit/s Ethernet ports

http://www.onestoppcshop.co.uk

Like a well-behaved child, Western Digital’s latest My Book World Edition is made to be seen and not heard: it’s impressively quiet, and its glossy white case looks sleek.

As with six of the other NAS devices here, you can copy files to and from the My Book over the internet with a web browser instead of an FTP program. Unfortunately, the MioNet Java remote access program that runs in your browser can feel sluggish, especially over slower connections, and doesn’t use all the available space in a browser window. We also had to configure port forwarding manually on our router, which we did by trial and error as it wasn’t detailed in the documentation.

We had no trouble streaming media from the My Book to a UPnP network media player or sharing the contents of a USB disk across our network. It can’t share a USB printer across a network, though, and iTunes didn’t recognise it as a music server. The My Book can download files from an FTP server or website independently of a computer. This feature is managed through the password-protected web administration interface, which isn’t ideal if others want to use this feature, too, as they could tamper with other settings.

The web configuration interface is divided into two sections. Simple user accounts and shared folders are created quickly in the Basic section, but more detailed settings are in the Advanced section. The controls for managing multiple users as groups, giving different groups different levels of access to shared folders and assigning disk space quotas is spread across three pages, making administration more time consuming than it should be.

The My Book was one of the quickest single-disk NAS devices here. It copied large files at an average speed of 22.1MB/s and small files at an average speed of 19.8MB/s.

Western Digital’s My Book World isn’t perfect but it’s fast and has a cost per gigabyte of just 13p – the lowest here. Unless you need RAID or other special features, it’s a great buy.

Basic Specifications

Price £139
Rating *****
Award Best Buy

Storage

Capacity 1TB
Formatted capacity 928GB
Default file system ext3
Price per gigabyte £0.14
Interface SATA 300
3.5in drive bays 1
Free 3.5in drive bays 0
RAID modes N/A

Interface

Ethernet ports 1
USB direct access ports (front/rear) 0/0
Other USB ports (front/rear) 0/1
eSATA ports (front/rear) 0/0
Other ports none

Networking

Ethernet connection speed 10/100/1000Mbit/s
Universal Plug and Play support yes
UPnP media server yes
iTunes yes
Print server no
USB disk server yes
Web server no
FTP server yes
Protocols supported TCP/IP, SMB/CIFS, AFP, FTP

Miscellaneous

Size 171x60x147mm
Weight 1.1kg
Vertical positioning yes
Ethernet cable included yes
Additional features MioNet remote access, web/FTP download manager
Power consumption idle 8W
Power consumption active 10W

Buying Information

Price £139
Warranty three years RTB
Supplier http://www.onestoppcshop.co.uk
Details www.westerndigital.com

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