WDG2NC10000N Western, This drive does EXACTLY..
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This drive does EXACTLY What It Says It Will
I have several other Western Digital MyBook directly attached drives and am very happy with them. This drive was purchased by a friend (at my suggestion) and sent to me for setup.
The installation instructions do leave a lot to be desired. I had to go to the WD Knowledge Base support website to find out how to reformat the drive into a raid 1 drive. Once I figured out that you MUST install the included software before you try and do ANYTHING everything went quite well. The drive reformatted without incident in about the five hours WD said it would take.
The next process was copying a 150GB drive from my directly connected MyBook drive to the World Edition. This takes about 2 hours on my directly connected drives. It takes about 8 - 9 hours with a gigabit ethernet connection from the computer through the router to the World Book. While this is a long time, it is not something that will be done more than once (especially with the raid 1 formatting.) After this the World Book functions like my other directly connected MyBook drives.
Because the World Book is an ethernet device attached to a router it is not necessary to have your computer running to access the drive. It is probably advantageous to not leave your computer on with no one around to deal with any problems that my arise while you are not there for an extended period.
What is special about the World Book is the Always Connected software it comes with. This allows anyone with a high speed internet connection to access files on the drive from anywhere. This particular drive will be accessed from Costa Rica for several weeks each year.
Do not discount the advantage of having all of your information in one place. No synchronization problems. No duplicates. No worry about sensitive information being moved around or more importantly, lost.
I would have rated the World Book higher if the instructions supplied by Western Digital were better. For someone without much computer experience, I can see twhis being a bit of a bear to install. If WD fixes the instructions, I would rate the World book 4 stars. AS IT IS, DO NOT BE AFRAID TO USE THE WD Knowledge Base for help. It is clearer than the supplied instructions.
Update (5/19/2012): This item is currently on sale here for the lowest price I’ve seen.
The featured review for this product, Western Digital WDG2NC10000N My Book World Edition II 1 TB Ethernet External Hard Drive Electronics, was written by L. Berkman.
The average rating for this item is out of 5 stars, according to 3 reviews.
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Tags: 1tb, bad, crap riaa mpaa, defective design, defectivebydesign, drm, edition ii, ethernet, external hard drive, external wireless hard drive, file server, hard drive, my book world, my book world edition, my book world edition ii, mybook, nas, network storage, western digital, world
Posted on: April 2, 2010
Filed under: Reviews
Reviews (2)
L. Berkman
March 4th, 2010 at 2:12 am
This drive does EXACTLY What It Says It Will
Rated 3 stars.
G. Conway
March 5th, 2010 at 9:13 am
If you must buy this make sure it is easily returned…
This unit does not support long path names. After each daily automated backup I saw a hyperlinked error message however nothing happened when clicked on. So after 7 days I tried a restore to a different computer and discovered that less than one-third of the files were being backed up.
I called WD tech support whose only solution was to use shorter pathnames. This was not acceptable and not even an option due to the software I use in particular AutoCAD.
I asked WD tech support why the Retrospect software did not report the error, there was no answer. I asked if there was an error log I could look at to see what the errors were, after checking with others on the support team I was told there was none.
No doubt my experience is colored by the lackluster performance of the particular person who ‘helped’ me … who asked me to run chkdsk and comprehensive disk diagnostics all of which I believe had nothing to do the problem.
Putting all that aside I think the concept of a mirrored hard disk backup that can be remotely accessed via the Internet is nothing short of brilliant. I had no trouble with the Mionet remote access software, it was fairly intuitive and easy to follow. But the Retrospect software that ‘came with’ is very limited, for example you can only schedule one automated back up. Even Handy Backup which I’ve used for years allows multiple schedules. As the WD tech support person said this software ‘was not very good’ and was simplified from older software to make it more user friendly. He added that the older software was still available and that they had nothing else to offer.
Otherwise it installed easily and we did not find the noise objectionable on the unit we had. Certainy it is a lot quieter than any of our Dell Workstation drives.
Fortunately I had bought this unit from Dell which made returning it a breeze, I am now looking to possibly a Buffalo or Maxtor unit with Cobian Backup (freeware) or similar after reading PC Magazines articles by Bill Machrone.
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