Western Digital My Book World Edition review

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.