Western Digital My Book World Edition Comments

How does this compare to the Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive that was released recently? Any chance of a group test of consumer level NAS boxes?

The £113.56 price quoted is actually for the old 500GB model

Why is the price listed as '£113.56 (Inc VAT)' which for the 500GB, but you reviewed the 1GB?

I still don't really get the idea. An old celeron-something PC is free from freesycle + 2 new 1tb drives = 2x£60 = £120. A little hungry on the energy side (depends) and a little more ugly and space consuming, but as for the abilities and flexibilities..! And, of course, price.

Nice to see a gigabit interface on a cheaper NAS.
I really hope NAS enclosures become as cheap as USB enclosures as demand goes up. Does this unit have a wake-on-lan feature?

Does it spin down the drive (apparently not all NAS's do) & what's the power draw like??

I've gone with Лис's idea - though it was an old pc from work with FreeNas put on it. The main drawback is it hasn't got SATA, so I'm currently stuck with an old 200gb IDE drive I had spare. It's the power it must suck up running 24/7 that I really don't like though. (planning to borrow a mates power meter at some point...)

No word on the performance? the old WD World Edition had realy useless transferspeeds (7-10mb sec over gbitt), any improvement here?

I use a Mac as my main PC and a netbook running XP as travelling machine. I always have a problem with automated backups for the Mac (including Time Machine) in that backups of a Mac are not readable as files on an XP. Does anyone know if I used this WD would the back up files from my Mac be readable from a windows machine on the network or remotely?

@ Rob - That's because Windows and OS X use different file systems (OS X uses HFS+ and Windows uses NTFS). Windows doesn't natively recognise HFS+ formatted drives so you will need a program in order to access the data on them (I think MacDrive and TransMac do this). At least, this is my understanding of it as I have never used a Mac.

@ smc8788 - thanks for your input. I appreciate why I presently cannot read Mac backup files on a Windows system. That is why I am curious whether the WD provides me a solution, without resorting to third party apps (I tried and did not find them useful). The video about this drive on the WD website suggests that a mixed Mac PC network is fully functional. I am unable to locate a website in UK that sells this drive. The 'latest price' link on TR goes to 100 of wireless router products.

The con with a lot of these storage solutions branded by Hard Drive mnaufactures is that they dazzle buyers with "features" while often hiding the fact that they have stuffed these products with turtle-slow 4200rpm drives. The slowest of the slow.

This review fails to address this question at all. Doesnt even raise it. I'd much rather read about hard issues like that, than run through "details" than can be found anywhere.

Any luck with anyone selling these yet?

I have the original 500GB Mybook world at it was unable to share certain types of files is this still a case on the new version?

Also is the firmware available to download as the menus are much cleaner than on the original?

I bought this from IT247.com (£130 and free postage). So far I am happy with what it can do. It works plug and play out of the box for my Mac, with no software needed. I then loaded the backup app and registered free on line for the web based remote access. All of this worked flawlessly. My main machine, my iMac, now background backs up incrementally to the network drive. I can access all the files, with read and write permission, from any web browser remotely. The strength of this system is that it works with a Mac/PC mixed system. Which means I can access the backup of my Mac from a Vista or XP PC on the same network (meaning sharing a wi-fi connection on the same router). Most Mac back ups are not readable by a PC (e.g. Mac Time Machine backups cannot be read by a PC), so this is really good news for me. There is an application for Vista and XP to detect and manage the network drive. On my Vista machine this worked fine, but on both my XP laptops, I could not get the detection software to work at all (even trying the later version from the WD website). So for my XP machines I had to manually map the network drive - not difficult, but also not at all intuitive for most users. Anyway, apart from this problem, I now have the system I am looking for: Mac / PC; silent incremental back up of my Mac to a network drive, that can be accessed by a PC on the local network or via a web browser on the internet. It is what I was looking for and this provides the solution in a relatively inexpensive package.