Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)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.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Western Digital My Book World Edition II - 1 TB (2 x 500 GB) Network Attached Storage
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.
