Western Digital Western Digital My Book World Edition II 1TB

Reviewed by: lbundle

Duration of ownership: 2 Months

Strengths: Size Design User serviceability

Weaknesses: Noise Speed Protocols

Overall: This NAS drive has a lot of potential. The next edition will be much better judging from what they left unfinished on this machine. First the good: It has a very nice look to it. User serviceability is an advantage, they allow you to change the drives and give you instructions. They give you the GPL source code and instructions. This has been invaluable to me as it has allowed me to teach it new tricks. It now has services like NFS and FTP running, and in a pinch it can become a (slow) web server. The not-so-good: I have it installed on the local gigabit network, but it's slow. It would have been nice if the USB interface could also be used to access the drive. It only has SMB started by default. It would be nice if that had other ways of accessing it available by default. The most evil thing they have installed is Mionet. I hate mionet because it spies on you and does not let you copy certain types of files such as music files and video files. I believe software should NOT be policing me. So I killed Mionet on my machine. The fan can be very loud and there seems no easy way around that. I keep mine in the next room because of that.