Wd My Book Live 2tb Nas

At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

Not bad performance
Capacious single-drive model

Cons

No dual-bulldoze redundancy
No USB port

Our Verdict

This Western Digital drive makes it piece of cake to test the NAS waters, offer gobs of storage, dandy performance, and Internet access for not much greenbacks.

Western Digital My Book Live network-attached storage

Western Digital's My Book series of consumer network-attached storage boxes has a new variant, the My Book Alive. With new sharing features–including a file-sharing portal–and great performance, information technology brings the My Book line up-to-engagement. Offer 2TB of storage, the My Book Live costs $229 (as of Oct 28, 2010), about one-half what you'd pay for similarly performing NAS competitors. (A 1TB version sells for just $169, also a bargain.)

WD claims performance upward to 100 megabytes per second for the My Book Live; and in both our testing and our hands-on evaluations, the bulldoze proved to be an excellent performer. We didn't see 100 MBps, simply nosotros did see xxx-MBps writes and 47-MBps reads. That's the kind of functioning we've encountered only from the Synology DS1010+ and the LaCie 2Big Network 2TB (our top performer, the QNAP TS-859 Pro, is far faster). Those are the three speediest NAS boxes nosotros've tested to date, so the My Volume Live is in exciting company.

Western Digital provides an app chosen WD Photos for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch that lets you view pictures stored on the My Book Live. You need to subscribe to Western Digital's MioNet Web-based data portal to apply information technology, merely that's free for whatever WD My Book Live owner. Unfortunately, Android and Palm OS users will take to stick with obviously old Spider web-based access. The app works quite well, simply it supports only JPEG files.

Setting up the My Book Live would take been easy for me without an older half-duplex hub on my network that the My Volume Live does non support. Half-duplex is rare, though; and once I removed the switch, installation proceeded without incident. The bulldoze'south SmartWare software detected and mapped the bulldoze and installed the Quick View and SmartWare monitoring utility.

The My Book Live serves up media to iTunes, likewise as DLNA and UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) media adapters via the embedded Twonky media server. Information technology worked perfectly with Windows Media Histrion 11, even with high bit-rate 1080p video.

The My Volume Alive's major limitation is past pattern: It'southward a single-drive NAS box. As a upshot, information technology'due south useful as shared storage, just less so for backup purposes. Nosotros recommend not trusting any single-drive product with your important data unless you're mirroring that drive off-site or locally. Given the unit's speed, backing up the My Book Live across the network is perfectly viable, merely brand sure you lot do then–unless, of class, yous're simply serving upward DVD rips and copies of your photos and music.

Some other limitation compared with other network-fastened drives: The My Book Live has no USB port for attaching printers or boosted USB drives.

The Western Digital My Book Live offers a ton of of NAS capacity for a relatively small amount of greenbacks. It's fast plenty that y'all won't even think of it as network storage once you lot set information technology up, and it serves upward media nicely. The remote access via MioNet is a major benefit likewise.