Otaku Gadgets

The 2 TB model of the MyBook world edition II comes with two 1 TB Green edition hard drives, formatted in mirrored, redundant RAID1. There is an advantage of RAID1 over using the 2 drives as single volume, as it helps keeps a complete copy of data and ensure the data is safe and secure in case a hard drive does fail. The main advantage of World edition II is that it offers small and medium business disaster recover which is cheap and simple. In case of disasters, the world edition II swaps the dead drive with a new drive and automatically rebuilds the live drive onto the backup drive, thus make a complete disaster recovery solution.

The new version world edition II network storage device comes with new features and a design with less heat emission due to green line of western digital hard drives and has less power consumption as compared with world edition. The initial process for set up and configuration hardly takes 10 minutes and all you need is the CD with your computer for configuring the device. For windows based computers you can install two applications namely WD Discovery client application and the other one which is available for both windows and OSX is WD Backup application.

For security purposes you can create new users for the system wherein you can encrypt there private share by making an extra layer and blocking unwanted and unknown people from accessing your primary network share. You can find the screen for this functionality under advanced mode, users and the folder share permissions. All you need to edit the rights is click on the edit icon to the right of each share and decide whom you want to access it or not. The reading speed is pretty good and peaks at around 40 Mbps or about 320 Mbps. There is plenty for streaming content and can do so almost all the common media applications and devices. It features streaming support for Windows media player, iTunes, PlayStation 3 and XBOX360. With its DLNA support it can stream media to network devices such as digital picture frames and audio receivers.

The western digital anywhere backup application can be compared with Time Machine and Windows Backup in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. The configuration, speed and notifications that come up constantly are a bit cumbersome when compared to offerings by Apple and Microsoft. By default anywhere backup will not back up anything apart from portions of C drive and that too unless you have the window for it in the foreground.

All in all, the device essentially covers the full gamut for users. The basic users will be content with the simple storage device along with recovery facility. Advanced users who look forward to taking the system to its peak and get dirty with it, get everything except couple of things like the automatic back up program which is not useful for anything important and the writing speed is quite lower than it should be providing. With a cost ranging from $399 for 2 TB to $699 for 4 TB and pluses like dead simple configuration and use, easy and advanced mode for all users, simple replacement facility in case of drive failure, silent and low heat output, along with being tweak friendly, it is definitely a good buy.