Product Details
- Size: 3 TB
- Color: Charcoal
- Brand: Western Digital
- Model: WDBACG0030HCH-NESN
- Platform: Windows
- Format: CD-ROM
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 5.50" h x
2.00" w x
6.60" l,
2.40 pounds
- Hard Disk: 3TB
- Networking: Ethernet 1000 Mb-s
Features
- Centralize and share media on your home network
- Back up all your PC and Mac computers
- View your photo collection with your iPhone
- Stream media to your entertainment center
WD My Book Live 3TB Personal Cloud Storage NAS Share Files and Photos
Product Description
WD's My Book Live home network drive allows you to consolidate your media in one central location for everyone on your wired or wireless network to access and enjoy. Automatically back up your PC and Mac computers to one safe place and stream your media to your entertainment center.
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
214 of 218 people found the following review helpful.
Bad reviews are real - file I/O performance slows over time
By Kenneth F. Krutsch
I won't re-hash what others have said, but the drive I/O performance (or lack thereof) is a real problem - especially with Time Machine.I have this device hard-wired into my router (Gb connection) and my MacBook Pro is also hard-wired into the same router. My initial Time Machine backup went with reasonable speed, but subsequent, incremental updates to the drive started dragging. I found that if I reboot the WD MyBook Live, it works better for a period of time, but then slows down. With wired, Gb networking end-to-end the Time Machine performance should be on par with my 800Mb Firewire portable drive, but it's not even close. Even just copying files via the Mac Finder over the (wired) network to the drive is agonizingly slow.That said, however, their iPhone app and web-based access tools are some of the best I've seen from this product category, so I will keep the device and see if things improve with a future software update; hence the 3 stars.Finally, I was hoping to use the DLNA server to stream high-resolution FLAC files to my network receiver (Denon DNP-720AE)... don't even think about doing that. The WD MyBook Live comes with an old version of Twonky Media Server that is incredibly buggy. Really, one of the most frustrating experiences I've had with a gadget in recent memory. There are instructions on the web to allow you to hack your drive and update the Twonky server, but I just don't have the time for that - especially since I have little faith that an updated version of the atrocious (and appropriately named) Twonky Media Server will be any better.UPDATE: Well, two weeks later... I decided to try manually upgrading the Twonky Media Server to 7.0.9 Special (version specific to NAS devices). If you Google around, you will find step-by-step directions on how to do this; if you are not afraid to ssh into the device and manually download and install software on the embedded Linux system, you will find it is time well spent. Twonky version 7.X seems to function correctly and is robust; I am happily streaming 24/96 FLAC files to my Denon, using the Android App BubbleUPnP as the control point. Works great.However, the Time Machine issue remains a show-stopper. I really *do* need to periodically reboot the drive or Time Machine incremental updates never finish. That is, it takes more than an hour to backup a single GB of changes (over a wired Gb network) and then it starts all over again. Rebooting the WD MyBook Live and restarting the Time Machine backup moves very quickly through the backup process. If I don't see a software update from WD in the next couple of weeks, I will have to move Time Machine backups to another device. Of course, it's possible that the issue is with Mac OS X (mountain lion); time will tell, I guess, but I find it odd that I can restart the WD and it moves fast, again. Restarting Mac OS X and restarting Time Machine does NOT seem to speed things up, on its own.UPDATE 2 (Sep 2012): Well, more time has passed and WD has released a F/W update. From what I can tell, the update did nothing to correct the problems I describe above. However, I finally decided to SSH back into the device and see if I could figure out things on my own. There is a daemon located in /usr/local/mediacrawler that seems to be the culprit. I removed the executable bit and restarted the device. File I/O performance with Time Machine and AFP file copies has drastically improved. The mediacrawlerd program was absolutely hogging the device's processor to the point of seriously degrading file I/O performance. FWIW, I posted my discovery on the WD support forum but have heard nothing back. Who knows what mediacrawler is supposed to do, but for my use cases it seems nothing useful. Time Machine backups and the Twonky Media Server run like champs! It's inexcusable that WD isn't aware of this issue, but in scanning the WD support forums they don't seem too responsive to customer complaints. I don't like writing bad reviews, but unless you are willing to SSH into the drive and upgrade/manage the embedded software, you should avoid this NAS device.UPDATE 3 (Oct 2012): WD MyBook Live has an embedded program called mediacrawler. I am not sure what mediacrawler does (I think it is indexing files for use by the remote access tools), but it severely degrades file I/O performance.I started noticing that TimeMachine backups were never completing - even with very small changes to my local HDD. Time Machine would sit forever trying to complete a 60MB (yeah, MEGAbyte) backup. And this is running Gb ethernet between the MacBook and the WD MyBookLive (i.e. not wireless). When I stopped Time Machine, I noticed that the HDD activity light on the MyBook Live would keep flicker forever.I SSH'd into the box and ran 'top'. Lo and behold, mediacrawler is using a huge amount of CPU and never stops running. Sometimes it would help things to reboot the system - for a while - but eventually the drive gets back into the same state. So, I've updated to the latest version of the firmware. Nothing improved with mediadcrawlerd. While mediacrawler *is* using a lot of CPU, the much larger problem is the constant disk contention. After I removed the exec bit from mediacrawerd and restarted, Time Machine is (again) running like a champ. I am watching the Time Machine window report only five hourse remaining for 250 GB of 510 GB. Not bad.With mediacrawler disabled, the Time Machine performance is very acceptable. However, it's clear that no one at WD is testing Time Machine backups for performance and while I have posted this finding on the WD support forum, no one seems to care.
217 of 234 people found the following review helpful.
Works great for Sonos..
By Thomas B Goodloe
Yesterday I purchased one of these drives to use as a Network Attached Storage drive for my Sonos music system. This drive is perfect for that setup and exceeded my expectations. The setup for this drive is a snap. My PC and Sonos system recognized it with zero issues. The drive throughput is about 70Mb/s which is plenty for my purposes. Also (and a key feature for Sonos), this drive will spin down after inactivity and will even let you set how long it waits before spinning down (have not seen any other drive in this price range which will do that). Also, this drive comes pre-formatted with an NTFS file system so no reformatting is needed like with most external drives. Having a drive with NAS capabilities is excellent because you need less hardware to make the drive available to Sonos. Lastly, because the drive doesn't have an on/off switch, you won't have to worry if you lose power that you'll have to turn this back on (like with the old Linksys NSLU2).The only reason I don't give this five stars is because the "access over the web" part of the feature set is misleading. What you might expect is that this drive is available over the web through some sort of login and without the need of a PC to facilitate. Unfortunately you need all of those things to make this drive accessible over the web. The software WD provides to enable this, "MioNet", seems dated and rickety- not to mention NOT free. If leaving your PC on is acceptable for you, might I recommend downloading the Opera web browser and using their "Unite" service which will provide many of the same services as MioNet- but for *free*.Overall a strong purchase and a nice product. If you have a Sonos system and want your music available, then this is the drive you need.
71 of 73 people found the following review helpful.
Bad Reviews Don't Reflect Latest Software
By Tom
I found the product I got to be way better than the reviews indicated. The main reason seems to be software updates. You should really ignore any complaints you read about the device from 2010, and a lot of them from 2011. The physical hardware is just a basic drive with a processor and a network connection. What makes a difference is the software - both on the drive, and the mybooklive website/iphone apps. Most of the complaints I was worried about turned out to have been fixed in the latest software. For example: A review complained about iTunes media sharing being broken by the latest iTunes update - I had no problem doing iTunes media sharing with the latest iTunes. A review complained about the Mio-net connectivity - This device no longer uses Mio-net.The mybooklive website lets you map your home mybook live drive as a network drive from any computer away from home. Its like at work where you have a network drive, but this is your home drive. You do have to keep in mind the data speeds are limited by the speed of your home internet connection. I also use the iphone apps. They have some cool features like caching built in. So when I pull down some pictures, they get stored on my iphone so that looking at them multiple times is quick. And the cache has a configurable limit.Setup is super easy. With almost no configuration I got iTunes media streaming, sharing of videos and pictures on my PS3, mapping this as a network drive to a relative's computer, and mapping this drive to computers in my house. Consolidating data to a central spot is something everyone wants to do, and there are a lot of network drives out there. But the sofware that comes with this device that makes everything so easy is what really makes the difference.One last note - you will need to backup this drive. As a single drive it is vulnerable. A super cool feature is that this drive actually has software to back itself up. You tell it a computer on your network to use (any computer it can see works, you don't need a special kind), and it will perform the backup to that computer. This means your data, as well as all the permissions you setup on the drive. So it might be a good idea to buy a cheap extra drive that you will use as a backup to your backup.
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