WD makes our NAS lives easier with their
latest personal cloud storage
Network Attached Storage (NAS) is, quite
rightly, one of the top Most Fantastic Things To Do With Your Home Network. The
problem is, NAS setups require a little network know-how, which may turn off
your casual consumer. Western Digital is addressing this issue by bringing NAS
to the masses... and they bring it filled to the brim with Life.
The WD My Book Live Duo is the successor to
the My Book Live, and ups the ante by supporting two drives instead of one. You
use the two 2TB drives as it is for 4TB worth of storage, or run it in RAID 1
to give your storage a chance to recover itself. The drive comes with RAID 0,
so you'll have to remember to activate it.
There's nothing much in terms of
aesthetics; the casing takes its 'My Book' moniker seriously and resembles an
obese paperback, and it stands like a black monolith. The back houses the
power, Ethernet and USB ports. The USB here is solely for expansion, however;
it lets you daisy-chain other drives into a larger storage.
The design is solid and the drive is
sturdily designed and reinforced. What we didn't like is the lack of active
cooling in the drive. While we've yet to experience overheating issues, the top
of the drive does get rather hot and you'll have to ensure that it has its
space.
Setting up the My Book Live Duo is the
greatest joy there is for network-retardant folks. The bundled software can detect
and automatically initiate the installation within moments, and the setting-up
happens over an easy and effective Ul. You can get the drive up and running in
no time, with no expertise needed.
We'll have you know that the drive's
performance is good, and the 800MHz CPU powering it makes it well speedy enough
for usual NAS purposes (streaming HD videos, accessing pictures, backing up
data). If you have a the Android or iOS apps downloaded, you can even stream
these content to your mobile devices. As a NAS solution, the My Book Live Duo
essentially ticks all the boxes.
Western
Digital My Book Live Duo
Price $ 425
Info www.wdc.com
Specifications
Capacity: 4TB
Connectivity: Gigabit Ethernet, USB
(Expansion only)
Storage controller: RAID 1
Dimensions: 165 x 157 x 99mm
Weight: 1.09kg
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