Western Digital My Book World Edition review

With the new World Edition of the My Book, Western Digital is finally moving away from its NetCenter NAS range. Although the drive has an Ethernet port and you can access the World Edition's files from any internet-connected PC, Western Digital is keen to point out that it isn't just a NAS drive.

This is because the World Edition comes with MioNet's software, which makes it far easier to access your files than via FTP. While FTP is fine for power users, not everyone wants or needs the complexity of a NAS drive such as the Synology. You can create user accounts and password-protected shared folders either via a browser or the MioNet software, which is easier to use. It's a cut-down affair, but for an annual fee of £30 you can upgrade to the full version, which offers access to all shared disks on your network. It also allows you to remotely control your PC.

It's possible to access the My Book through firewalls because it simply transfers everything over secure http (as most ADSL connections have a limited upstream speed of around 0.5Mb/sec, though, you won't want to upload large files from the My Book to a remote PC). During testing, we found our drive often failed to obtain an IP address from the router, so wasn't accessible. Western Digital is investigating this problem, and when we have a definitive answer we'll print an update on www.pcpro.co.uk.

There are two capacities: 320GB and 500GB, plus a World Edition II with two 500GB disks and RAID1 support. It's a shame the PSU isn't built in and that the USB port is for adding extra storage rather than local access. Performance over the Gigabit Ethernet connection was also slower than we'd expected, at 4.7MB/sec for writing and 6.9MB/sec for reading. The 500GB version runs quietly, though: the 1TB model has a noisy fan that kicks in when temperatures rise.

The My Book World Edition is good value, but until Western Digital can fix the IP address issue we can't recommend it.

Author: Jim Martin