Western Digital My Book World Edition 2 TB Network Attached Storage WDH1NC20000N (White)
Western Digital My Book World Edition 2 TB Network Attached Storage WDH1NC20000N (White)
- Automatic and continuous backup for all the computers on your network
- Cutting-edge technologies to deliver high performance read and write speeds ideal for the most demanding users
- Built-in media server for streaming music, photos and movies to any DLNA certified multimedia device
- Centralize your music collection and stream to a Mac or Windows PC using iTunes software
Simplified set up and best-in-class performance make My Book World Edition Home Network Storage the easy choice for centralizing data and backing up your home computers. Connect the drive to your network router and you¿re up and running in minutes.
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(out of 145 reviews)
List Price: $ 279.99
Price: Too low to display
Review by Donovan for Western Digital My Book World Edition 2 TB Network Attached Storage WDH1NC20000N (White)
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When I saw this, I got pretty excited because I’d been looking for these features and they all came together in one drive.
Setup: The setup was easy and quick. Not a lengthy user manual but enough to get you going and more info on the disc. It asks for a driver update when introduced to new machines but I haven’t seen a need for it after connecting through Windows Network (although it works with Macs as well, not just Windows). I haven’t done much with the remote access but it looks easy to use so far.
Capabilities: It does everything I needed (i.e. let me get to my music, movies and pictures in one place). I watch a lot of downloaded movies on my Xbox 360 so it’s nice to be able to put them on the big screen in the living room or open one from a laptop in bed without having to move the file or drive or have it take up space on both machines.
One of the big pluses beyond having your music/ movies available from any computer in the house is that you also improve your computers by freeing up that space – especially with desktops. I used to have gigabytes full of music on my desktop and laptop but now I have a lot more free space on my desktop so I don’t need a new internal drive for that to keep it fresh.
Performance: It runs on ethernet and wifi so be careful with reviews on speed. USB connections run about the same on every machine but networking depends on your computer, your wifi standard and your router. If you have a fast machine, a good router and preferably N-WiFi, you’ll get good speed. Of course, ethernet connection is really fast but I use wireless N and it’s not quite the same but it gets the job done. Speed is only an issue for large file transfer but not actual usage. I haven’t seen any hiccups streaming and watching movies (~700MB each) or listening to music.
Price: Some of my friends have NAS systems that house up to 8TB and run about $1,000+ but I’m not there yet. This one is great for the money – especially considering the price of a 1TB alone and the additional features.
Improvements: I wish file transfers were a little faster – I know that that depends on my router and computer as much as the drive, but you can’t blame a guy for wanting a little more!
The write up covers a lot of the specs and details on what it can/can’t do. This is just my view of the product. Hope it helps!
Review by SanjeevP for Western Digital My Book World Edition 2 TB Network Attached Storage WDH1NC20000N (White)
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Just plug in this drive to the power outlet and your router and it shows up as network drive on all the network computers and even in iTunes. On Windows it shows 3 folders: Public, Download & Configuration and on Mac the only first two. I have not been able to create custom folders yet and may have to dig the manual on how to do that. So far, I have also not been able to figure out how to secure the back up data.
The backup software worked well on Mac. It automatically backs up in the background like Time Machine. But this drive does not work with Time Machine itself on Mac. Apple technical support informed me that Time Machine works with USB drives and the only network drive Time machine works with is Time Capsule!
On Windows, the software is so painfully slow that I gave up and have not been able to test it yet. Neither have I tested the remote access through Mionet. The hard drive goes to sleep if it is not used for a while and disconnects from the network. Then you have to turn it off and on again to connect to the network.
You can also attach a USB drive to MyBook drive’s USB port to extend storage. But this drive itself does not work as a USB drive. Overall, it works well as Network Attached Storage.
UPDATE 5/16/2009: I downloaded the latest version of WD Anywhere Bckup for Windows and it is much faster and works really well. But you cannot customize backup. You can specify what files you want to back up, like Word document, Excel spreadsheet etc. but it won’t let you backup custom folders that are not part of My Documents.
6/14/2009: I have still not been able to secure the data, create custom folders or customize the backup and if anyone knows how to do that, I will appreciate your comments. But I have tried remote access on Mionet and it works. Again, you cannot selectively provide remote access to specific folders. Basic Mionet access is included with the drive, but Mionet keeps on annoyingly nagging you to pay for premium access.
Review by F. Rogers for Western Digital My Book World Edition 2 TB Network Attached Storage WDH1NC20000N (White)
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I bought this expecting just a simple, no-frills NAS device, but WDC really packed a lot of functionality into this thing. You can access your files via HTTP, FTP, CIFS (Windows shares), or SFTP, it comes with media server software (“TwonkyMedia”) built in, and best of all, it gives you full access via SSH to the Linux-based OS running under the hood. The amount of tinkering potential this little thing has is a power user’s dream.
Review by M. Smith for Western Digital My Book World Edition 2 TB Network Attached Storage WDH1NC20000N (White)
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This is the first Western Digital Product I’ve ever used that felt less than top-drawer. I started out wanting to love it, but the bundled software is less than a happy choice.
Physicals? Looks good, hooks up easily, runs quietly. As to hardware, Western Digital has always had that nailed.
Installation & Use? Uh-oh. They ought to go back to Square One.
The included software wants to totally insulate you from the drive. It wants to create aliases for the top-level directories you create on it, immediately using a peck of allowable drive names. Left to itself, it assigns them from the back of the alphabet: Z:, Y:, X:, and so forth. So this Network Attached Storage (NAS) looks like a series of hard drives attached to your system, which you’ll find on My Computer, not on My Network Places. As a network resource, this is counterintuitive. STRIKE ONE.
I am the chief of the family’s LAN and I’m the one who has to fix issues. This approach hides directories set up by other family members, meaning I’ve got to take over their machines to help on any problem.
Fortunately, if you’re smart enough to noodle around in the Workgroup level of your LAN, you can find and get access to the top-level directories outside of the aliases, but nothing in the Help will tell you how to do that.
Next, the software locks directories, even those for which you configured user names and passwords. The directory where my own computer’s backup is stored is now listed as a disconnected network drive and attempting to use the alias gets this error message: MULTIPLE CONNECTIONS TO A SERVER OR SHARED RESOURCE BY THE SAME USER, USING MORE THAN ONE USER NAME, IS NOT ALLOWED.DISCONNECT ALL PREVIOUS CONNECTIONS TO THE SERVER OR SHARED RESOURCE AND TRY AGAIN. Since this comes up after rebooting the Western Digital drive AND my computer, I have to assume it’s the backup software claiming the directory and locking it. It doesn’t even ask for the user name and password I set up for the directory. STRIKE TWO.
I set up the included Memeo backup software and it nicely decided to run at a priority level whereby I could use my machine for something more than its screen-saver during the backup. Problem with this setup: it is far to easy to sweep in stuff you have no intent of backing up. It offers to backup all images, for instance. Well, that means every stinking little icon or graphic anywhere on your computer. If you’re a gamer, as am I, it will backup every image it finds in each of your games, when all you really wanted was the family photos. It doesn’t get any better in advanced mode, where you try to pare this stuff down more exactly. Apparently you have to exclude all these places where game images may be. Same thing for sound files and videos. You want to backup your ripped CDs and your cache of YouTube videos – but every “whiz” and “bang” and voice in each of your games will be relentlessly hunted down and backed up. The wording of the selection criteria also makes it look as though files that meet two criteria get backed up twice – for instance, if you check the boxes to back up “My Documents” and “Financial Files”, and your Quicken files are stored in My Documents, will it back them up twice? Memeo answered my emailed question with a “no”, but allowed they may need to tweak what the program says, because it is misleading.
But why do you care if it backs up extra stuff? It’s a nice big ONE TERABYTE drive, for gosh sake! Here’s the answer – it’s dead slow at backing up. Once it took my criteria for what to back up, it started cranking… and kept cranking… for FORTY-EIGHT HOURS, during which it copied FIFTY-ONE GIGABYTES. Without running the calculation to be sure, I feel confident that if I had a pile of 3.5″ diskettes I was willing to keep feeding, I could copy 51 GB in FAR less time than this. Sure, I saw that it was doing housekeeping too, like verifying each file was an accurate copy, but c’mon. If this were a USB drive attached directly to my computer and I gave it a list of directories to copy, the job would be done in minutes. I can’t countenance the performance difference between that and Memeo’s software. And, oh yeah, you can’t schedule your backups for the middle of the night, because Western Digital only saw fit to give you Memeo’s basic product, and if you want features like you get from MozyHome Online Backup (for free), you’re going to have to buy an upgrade from Memeo. STRIKE THREE.
At this point I haven’t tried remote access of the NAS drive across the Internet. I don’t need this feature.
My takeaway –
I’m teetotally aggravated by the software that came with this drive. You will probably do better if you simply let each PC on your LAN find drivers on the Internet, instead of installing this junk. Get something different to do your backups; Memeo is not ready for prime time.
Review by D. McClintock for Western Digital My Book World Edition 2 TB Network Attached Storage WDH1NC20000N (White)
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I bought this drive to use as network storage for video editing and multiple computer backups. Biggest problem I had was that it was exceedingly slow to transfer. It advertises Gigabit ethernet, but has an onboard processor that is 10-15 times slower, bottlenecking the entire process. I found it took me only 15 seconds to transfer 1GB from my laptop to desktop via ethernet (through my router), but it took 4.5 minutes to transfer the same 1 GB file to the MyBook World Edition located on the same router. I tried letting it sit overnight as I transferred 1TB of data to it – it stalled at 300GB when I found it the next morning.
Definitely not worth the money. I returned it and am looking for something better. I guess it’s okay if you don’t want to actually access or write to the drive often…