Hardware Geeks

Today Western Digital (WD) introduced the new My Book World Edition, a network hard-drive that offers plug and play installation and automatic continuous backups making it easy to keep all the data on all of your PCs safe.

The My Book World Edition is available in 1 TB and 2 TB capacities and it will work with PC’s and Macs, I am also able to access it’s web interface with a linux machine, however the included backup software does not work with Linux. The My Book World Edition does support DLNA so you can easily stream the contents (Music, Movies and Pictures) of your My Book to your Sony Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and any other device that supports DLNA. It even works as a server for iTunes.

I have been using the My Book World Edition for about a week now, and I have to say even though I am a huge Home Server Fan, this solution is one of the easiest to set up. It took me litterally less than 2 minutes to get it up and running on my network and about 30 seconds for the included software to detect it on my network.

The My Book World Edition has a nice sleek and elegant design that allows it to fit anywhere perfectly with out being an eye sore. Just check the picture below. I have mines on my book case next to my Mickey Mouse Star Wars figurine.

As I said an elegant device, and if you are wondering what the white light is in the middle, it is a status indicator and it moves up and down as the drive works, it also is a gauge and will give you a general idea on how full your drive is.

Your probably wondering how easy it is to set up the My Book to back up your data. Well it comes with WD Anywhere Backup, and it pretty much guides you through the scheduling of the backup. All you really have to do is tell it when and it does the rest. However if you are like me with multiple hard drives, you may need to tell the software what drives to backup as it tends to automatically just pick your default C drive and it’s folders. The backups are continuous so if you edited a file, there’s a good chance with in 10 minutes it’s already backed up to the My Book.

But there is more to the WD My Book World Edition than just backing up, you can use it as a media server as I said earlier and it’s really easy to do. When you set up the software on your computer, it will ask you to make the drive to your “My Computer” or “Computer” Folder and will display two network drives. The public folder you can upload your music, movies and pictures to it and share them through out your network easily, and as I mentioned above if you have a DLNA device it gets even easier to share things around your home. I personally am able to stream movies and music to my PS3 and Xbox 360 with no issues what so ever. Both detected my My Book World Edition automatically.

Something else to mention is the fact that the My Book World Edition is green! The Device uses a 1 TB WD SATA drive that uses their Green Power technology. Basically the drive only works when it’s supposed too, if you don’t need the drive to run at it’s full power it won’t, it will even park the platters. All of this will make the device use less energy when compared to similar devices with out the Green Power technology.

You can also share your files remotely via the MioNet service, the service is free and also very easy to use. It pretty much acts as a middle man between your My Book, and whomever is accessing the device.

I also have to mention something that surprised me, while in a briefing with WD they mentioned that the drives read and write speeds even though on the network would seem as fast as if it were an internal drive on my system. I kind of didn’t believe that but I have to say they were telling the truth. When accessing the drive via my “Computer” folder there really is no load time and I am able to read and write to it almost as fast as the drives I have installed inside my system. It isn’t as fast but it’s pretty darn close. However every-ones network is different so you may not experience the same speed I do.

Overall the WD My Book World Edition is a great backup solution, and for the $229.99 price tag for the 1TB or $449.99 for the 2 TB it’s worth every penny in my opinion. The drive looks good, is easy to set up and fast. The My Book World Edition should be available now directly from WD at http://store.westerndigital.com/

We award the WD My Book World Edition our 5 Star Gold Editors Choice award for the Month of February 2009.

Post Tags: review  storage  wd  western digital  backup  my book world edition 

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