Digital Home Thoughts: Western Digital My Book World Edition 1TB

Hardware
Before we fire it up, let's start off by taking a look at the hardware itself.


Figure 1: In the box.

In the box, you get the drive, manuals, an installation disk, a power cable, and a network cable.


Figure 2: Connections.

The back of the unit features connections for power, network, USB, and a security cable. Despite the USB connection, this device is network only. Instead the USB connection allows you to add an additional external drive to the unit and expand the capacity of your network storage. Sharp eyed viewers will notice that the air vents on the unit appear to be Morse code. Well you would be correct, but I won't spoil the fun if you want to figure it out, but the answer is easily Googled.

The front of the unit features a single power button in the middle of two illuminated blue circles. One of the circles indicates the power status while the other reflects a general idea of how much empty space you have remaining on the drive. From more than a few feet away, I could not hear the drive over the ambient noise in my office.

The folks at Western Digital told me that earlier versions of this drive were built with two 500GB drives while the newer drives are slimmer and based on a single drive. Personally, I'd be willing to put up with a larger footprint in order to have two drives and the ability to use RAID to mirror your data across the drives for redundancy in the event that one drive failed.

Since I know some people would just as soon build a small server rather than look at this product, I wanted to see how much power this actually used. So, I hooked it up to my Kill A Watt and found that it draws only 11 watts. I doubt you can built a server that uses that little power. Since something like this is meant to be left on 24 hours a day, just the power savings can add up over time. However, I noticed that it always drew 11 watts, regardless of whether the drive was in use or not. So, I think there is certainly room for improvement by the addition of a power save mode that could power down the unit to a sleep mode and automatically wake it up when needed.

Installation
MioNet is the software application that Western Digital provides with this drive. MioNet is Windows only with Vista support recently added. Software installation from the included CD was uneventful on my desktop, but constantly froze before completion on my laptop. A download of the install program from MioNet rectified the problem. Curiously, I also got this message during my desktop installation - the review copy must have come with a little something extra.


Figure 3: MioNet, now with 20% more code.

After installation, MioNet automatically gives you a 30 day trial of their upgraded features which allow additional access to your host PC, including remote file access, desktop sharing, and remote computer control (a la PC Anywhere).


Figure 4: You can share your desktop using the bonus features of MioNet.

I demoed these features and they worked well. If they sound like something that would be useful to you, after the demo, a subscription will run you $79.99 per year. While trial offers are great, there was no way to decline the offer and once installed, it defaults to opening your computer to this access. I feel strongly that these features should not have been turned on by default, without the permission of the user.


Figure 5: The trial features are installed by default.

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