WD My Book World Edition – Drive letter access over the Internet!
This blog seems to be changing into a storage blog, but recently there are a lot of storage products that catch my eye. The new WD My Book World Edition II is a two drive NAS box, but with key differences! Nice, but not exceptional features, are an attractive industrial design, either 1TB capacity or 500GB with RAID-1 mirroring, Gb Ethernet connection, and EMC (Dantz) Retrospect backup software. The differentiators what WD calls WD Anywhere Access and Data OnHand, which allow you to access your files securely over the Internet as if they were a local drive, i.e., with drive letter access! No FTP access, no navigating through screen after screen and accessing files one at a time over the Mirra… your My Book looks like a local drive no matter where you are, easily browsed with Windows Explorer.
The online user manual instructs you to remove MioNet from your PC if it is already installed. MioNet is a product of Senvid, a Palo Alto startup, that runs on Windows 2000, 2003, and XP, along with OS X, that allows you to access your storage through a secure connection through their servers, similar to Mirra. It turns out that Mionet is written in Java, so porting it to run on Linux, which the My Book undoubtedly uses, was likely straightforward.
To me, this blows away not only older generation NAS boxes like the Buffalo Terastation but also the brand new Seagate Free Agent drives. The Memo AutoBackup application is nice, but the drive letter access over the Internet is a killer app and it kills the Free Agent drives. And the aggressive pricing of $500 for the 1TB World Edition II and $279 for the 500GB World Edition should make them real winners. I want one. Badly. And I hope I can back it up using Mozy. 
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I just got one. It is awesome and yes, you do want one too!
Just a word of caution, keep your set up simple. I put my drive on a different subnet and that doesn’t work. You need to make sure it is on the same subnet as your computer.
My only complaint is that there isn’t much I can configure so it does what it does and I have to live with it. For example, how do I change the drive letter for the mapping?
Aaron, thanks for the feedback. Actually, I’m really enthusiastic about the Windows Home Server for which I’m a beta tester. It doesn’t have drive letter access like the WD World Edition, but in other areas it looks really compelling. I’ll detail more when I get a chance.
While the features of the unit look great, I’ve been disappointed in it.
The transfer speeds are fairly slow so I don’t even know why they bothered with a Gigabit network interface (My net work is Gigabit).
The unit freezes all the time or goes into some sort of sleep mode. The only way I can get it back online is to reboot the thing. So much for hiding it away in cupboard as now it needs to be handy for rebooting every few hours.
I can live with the slow transfer speeds but the constant freezing is driving me nuts.
I have just installed one. so far so good. But it does not seems to allow remote users (like my daughter) to access or even see AVI and similiar files.
Do you know anything about this?? Solution??
Owlhunter, sorry, I can’t help you. I’m using the Windows Home Server beta, not the WD World Edition. It’s great. I know I need to blog about it.
I have the WD MyBook World 500GB
It is an awesome hard disk, but it has some problems. I am trying to change the drive letter, because it is giving conflicts with my USB stick. But I don’t know how to change the drive letter. Further the speed of the hard disk is very disappointing. Can anyone help me?
I have bought one too and it’s the worst thing I have ever in computer business seen! It has only one led light, so you have no chance to know what is it doing. It can even light green and be switched off! The configuration web pages are totaly sloooow (10 seconds for every answer) and it can comunicate only via NetBIOS over TCP/IP (port 139). So it is problematic to use it with Windows 2003 servers. Poor configuration, poor documentation. Yak!
But do you get bare metial restores?
You might want to look at a new media release by Storage Guardian that is offering online backup and bare metal restores with a special promotion – see http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/04/prweb872084.htm for the release and http://storageguardian.com for the company site
I have one. It is not all it is cracked up to be. Dont use the MIONET software. I am looking for an alternative to it.
As far as running it on your home network it works great, as long as you never install any mionet software.
You can share all files video and otherwise.
I have not found any software that will let me access the drive once I am away from home tho.
Just bought one despite all the bad review.. and boy I regret it big time..=(
The drive works fine.. with MIONET at home.. cos I think I am running it using gigabit ethernet.. but when trying to access the drive from outside (which is what I bought the drive for).. it fail to allow me to transfer the files.. I see the drive on MIONET (after it takes forever to mount) but I cannot transfer the files out..
Hai.. in my country, there is no such thing as return or exchange policy.. so tough luck.. Have to find workaround for it.. which means spending hours and hours of config which may brick the drive..
Never had a more inconvenient drive in my life! You get disconnected from you local drive when you loose internet connection because of that stupid mionet software. Other than that, performance is really bad bad bad bad. You can not even play a live video over a 54 mb/s wireless connection. This is the wordt buy I did in many years. Sorry WD, back to the drawing boards. I’d kill this application instead of calling it a killer application.
it, s the biggest bullshit …
yeah bad product and has not a op. for usb directconn.
if one wanted that.. and because it goes off and on line all the time and thus changing driveletter
it is a gamble to move big files… a usb would prob. go fine instead of lan..
better open the box an put the disk in a desktop..
Mine kept dropping off line 2 or 3 times a week.
Then I noticed it was kind of warm.
Put a small fan near it…. been online for two weeks now.
Big limitations:
Very slow file transfers
1,000 files in folders/sub-folders craters the drive…. so watch your picture loads.
The Mionet software is the biggest piece of crap I’ve ever had the misfortune to have to deal with.
Horrible, just horrible.
The consequences for teachers and stu- dents alike have been disastrous. ,