Western Digital’s My Book line of drives spans nearly all areas of external storage, supporting fast modern interfaces from FireWire 800 and eSATA to USB 3.0. Yet the My Book Live is network drive and, in terms of connectivity, sports nothing more than a DC input and a gigabit Ethernet port. Western Digital My Book Live …

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Friday 31st December 2010 14:34 GMT Anonymous Coward

It would be interesting to test the transfer speed

from a dos command line or, even better, from a *nix box. From my experience, a good old cp would yield better figures for file transfers. Starting with Vista, Windows sometimes has the nasty habit of throttling the NIC transfer speed in order to protect global user experience.

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Friday 31st December 2010 14:45 GMT Alex 14

Comparison?

It would have been nice to hear how this compares to the My Book World in terms of features and speeds. I was recently deciding which of the two My Book NAS boxes to get (in the end went with the older World which includes a USB port for faster transfers and extra storage. The extra speed seemed to be the only thing going for the Live over the World.

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Friday 31st December 2010 14:47 GMT KJ

Stability

I can attest to the instability of the My Book series. I bought a 1TB version just over a year ago to act as an external backup drive and to take all of my data with me when I went travelling. It is ridiculously easy to knock over and consequently, it's died after less than a year.

If anyone buys this, I strongly recommend that they find some way of wedging it upright to prevent any premature drive deaths.

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Friday 31st December 2010 21:02 GMT Anonymous Coward

These boxes still scare me

I appreciate the target audience of this device is small home user, but apart from the home network sharing does this really achieve anything better than simply plonking a 2TB drive on a desktop?

I have seen to many single drives go pop to trust these things, I much prefer paying a little bit more of something like ReadyNAS/FreeNAS, where you can RAID the disks and at least have a little more peace of mind to know that a single disk failure is not going to loose all your precious backups of photos and other media.

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1. Tuesday 4th January 2011 13:40 GMT No, I will not fix your computer
  
  Re: These boxes still scare me
  
  What does RAID give you? it might save you from a single drive failure, that's all.
  
  An accidential delete, theft, water, power surge and both mirrors are gone, but use an (additional) USB drive to backup the data, lock it away (pref in a fireproof box), or a second box on the network (in the garage/loft) that rsyncs overnight and (for less than the price of building your own dedicated NAS box) you have something far more robust.
  
  Seriously, a single drive is (like you say) scary if your data is important, but having known a company that went under (pretty much because) they naively relied on RAID only to have the entire server and backup USB drives stolen, when 1Tb USB drives can be had for £50 and a fire resitant box for £30, just thinking RAID is all you'll ever need will disappoint when you could have had a cheaper and better solution, if you're going to do something to prevent loosing [:-)] your data don't do something half arsed.
  
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Friday 31st December 2010 21:35 GMT Al Jones

Power?

For a device that is likely to be on 24x7, it'd be nice to know how much power it uses, and, if it has some sort of low power "sleep" mode, how quickly does it wake up?

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Friday 31st December 2010 21:56 GMT colinm

Power usage?

Could The Reg get a watt meter (e.g. N67HH from Maplin) and quote the typical power usage in their reviews of always-on equipment?

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1. Tuesday 4th January 2011 09:20 GMT TWB
  
  RE: Power usage?
  
  I suggested this to The Reg a couple of years ago and they do it sometimes...., but not always as I believe they should.
  
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Tuesday 4th January 2011 09:20 GMT Fred Flintstone

No - it absolutely fails rule 1

Any designer that puts a spinning hard disk in a case that can fall over ought to be strung up by his balls. Dropping the case is AFAIK about cause #1 of total data loss - the case falls over with the disk spinning (thus not parked), leading immediately to a head crash when the case lands.

Bye bye data, and small chance of recovery. Major, no, EPIC fail.

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Tuesday 4th January 2011 09:20 GMT BristolBachelor

Compatibility

The article says Windows XP, Vista, 7 and OSX, but doesn't say anything else. Does that mean that it is only compatible with these? Does it not work with Win CE(or WinCE based media players)? What about *ix? Does it need to use special software, or does it just use SMB, and it is actually compatible with lots of stuff, and this is just a list from WD?

I

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Tuesday 4th January 2011 09:20 GMT Mark 65

Green power

Guarantee it'll be using one of those shitty green power drives to keep consumption low. The first hard drive failure I've had in 14 years in IT came via a My Book drive fitted with one of these. Split the case open and connected another drive -> case worked fine. Put the green drive in 2 other enclosures -> drive fired up then cycled down, repeat ad-nauseum. Piece of shit.

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Tuesday 4th January 2011 09:23 GMT David Hicks

Amazed at the transfer rate

As I have a WD sharespace and it can barely manage half that. They must have finally put a decent processor in the thing, because the sharespace hits the CPU limit when chucking out 24MBps, and that's using ftp. Samba and scp are even worse.

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Tuesday 4th January 2011 13:05 GMT Anonymous Coward

Have to laugh

The reviews on this site are usually not much more than a jumped up press release regurgitation. Why is anyone expecting any useful information?

Every single review usually has requests in the comments for Simple things that have been quite obviously missed off the review.

The Reviews are usually questionable and verdicts often a joke.

I wonder sometimes if they actually have the product they are supposed to be reviewing.

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