In principle it is a simple matter to
connect the WD My Book live to your network. The drive uses the familiar WD
styling and looks something like a book, provided the books on your shelves are
made of grey plastic and have a bright activity LED on the spine.
It's easy to become obsessed with the WD
activity light but we'll come to that in a moment.
On the rear of the casing, the My Book Live
has a jack for the power connection and a gigabit Ethernet network connection,
and that's your lot, unless you want to get picky and mention the Kensington
lock. There are no power or control buttons, and you don't get a sniff of a USB
port either.
This simple appearance reflects the purity
of the WD design. It runs Debian Linux on a 1GHz CPU with 256MB memory, and has
a desktop 3.5" drive sealed inside the casing. 2TB and 3TB models are also
available at $216 and $304 respectively.
So you connect the drive by plugging in the
two cables and wait a short time until the activity light turns to a solid
green. Once that happens you run the WD software disc to discover the My Book
Live on your network and then you can install the WD Quick View management
software.
Except that the activity light remained
amber in a cannot-see-the-network sort of way. We ran the WD software which
could see the drive, but we couldn't do anything more sophisticated than
opening the public share folders on the drive. Clicking the 'setup' button
merely opens a browser with an IP address 192.168.0.16, yet the window remained
completely blank and there was no drive activity.
After a moment of thought we visited the WD
website and found a utility called WD SmartWare updater v1.5.4.8 which updated
QuickView from v3.1.5.4 to v3.1.5.9, and then sat alongside QuickView as a network
management utility.
Once that was done we restarted the WD My
Book live and the all-important solid green LED came to life on the front of
the drive. The next step was an automatic update as the software got busy
updating the firmware on the drive. The process took about ten minutes and
introduced us to the blue/ white LED where the My Book Live sat there looking
at us like a sullen teenager.
When the process was complete we restarted
the WD, and got first the blue light, then yellow, then flashing green followed
by solid green. You see what we mean when we told you the light could turn into
something rather obsessive?
From this point onwards the WD My Book Live
was an utter joy. The software worked properly and we could assign a name to
the drive, set a backup strategy, manage users and also set up a personal
cloud. Sorry, that should be a 'Personal Cloud', as these are clearly the
buzzwords of the moment.
Western Digital has another trick up its
sleeve as it offers some remote access apps for iOS and Android. These are WD
Photos, WD2 go (file viewer) and WD2go Pro, which gives full access to your
files so that you can modify them while you're on the move. WD2go Pro costs
$3.184 and won't be relevant for most home uses but it could be a real blessing
for business travellers.
Details
Price:
$192
Manufacturer: Western Digital
Website:
www.wdc.com
Required spec: Windows XP or Mac OS X 10.5 onwards
|
Seagate
2tb Freeagent Goflex Home
Seagate
delivers a useful chunk of storage with the minimum of hassle for the home user
and the price is good too.
WD
1TB My Book Live
A simple NAS that required a bit of work
on our part but delivered the goods in the end.
