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

MioNet Software
The MioNet software is designed to automate the process of locating and mounting the drive so that it's accessible to Windows regardless of whether you are working locally on the network or externally accessing the drive via the Internet. The My Book comes with five MioNet licenses, which should be enough for most home user's needs. The software also allows you to manage the settings of the drive. Due to the way the software works, it requires you to be connected to the Internet to be able to find the drive even if you are on the internal network. I don't think this is optimal because it leaves too many points of failure. If your Internet connection is down or the MioNet server is down, you will not be able to access your data even when you are local on the network. During this review, I had instances where MioNet would not connect to the drive, leaving it totally inaccessible. With some help from tech support and some of my own tinkering with my computer and router settings, it appears that I have the problem solved. Since the software is designed to make the drive an easy way for a novice user to add network storage, it should really have some diagnostic features to help you figure out solutions if you have problems. Otherwise, the software could tend to frustrate the same users it was designed to help.


Figure 6: MioNet's errors could use a diagnostic function to help solve the issue.

Remote Connection
One of the nice things about this drive is that with a Web connection, you can access your data from anywhere. There are two ways to do this. First, you can use the MioNet software to map the drive and it will behave as if you are on the local network; although your connection speed will vary depending on how your home network and your remote computer are connected to the Web. MioNet also has a Web access option. This method has the additional advantage of allowing you to access your data from any computer that has a Java capable browser without having to install anything.


Figure 7: Accessing MioNet via the Web.

You can also add secured directories that can allow anyone access over the Web, basically giving you a file server. Western Digital staff did inform me that they don't allow sharing of music and video files for copyright reasons, so some of the obvious applications of this feature are out. There has been a lot of commentary online recently regarding this limitation. While I agree that Western Digital should not be setting artificial limits on the user, for most users this will be a non-issue since this limitation only applies to true sharing. Any of your five licensed computers will be able to access all files from anywhere and you can also access all files from anywhere using the Web access option.

Another Way
If you are more hardcore, don't want to be able to mount the drive remotely, and use the other MioNet special features, there really is no need to use their software. You can map the drive directly through Windows and access the setting for the drive through a Web interface by simply typing its IP address into your browser. You can also still access the drive remotely using the MioNet website as described above. I like this method because you are able to access the drive locally regardless of if you are connected to the Internet or not.

Speed Test
Finally, no hard drive review would be complete without a speed test. I picked a 691 MB folder containing 145 MP3 files. Over my wired network I had an average transfer speed of 5.7 MB/s download and 3.94 MB/s upload. Over wireless, it was 2 MB/s download and 1.68 MB/s upload.

Conclusions
Overall, I was pretty pleased with this drive once I got it up and running. While the software could use some work, this is still probably the easiest way for most consumers to add standalone storage as well as remote data access to their network. However, if you are looking for a full fledged file server for the Web and plan on serving up music or video files, this is not the product for you.

Chris Gohlke is a Contributing Editor for Digital Media Thoughts. He loves Sci-Fi and loves to get his hands on real-life tech gadgets. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, USA with his wife and three cats.