Product Details
- Size: 6 TB
- Brand: Western Digital
- Model: WDBVHT0060JCH-NESN
- Format: CD-ROM
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.50" h x
3.90" w x
6.20" l,
4.98 pounds
- Hard Disk: 6TB
Features
- Storage and backup for all the PC and Mac computers on your network
- View photos and files with apps for your iOS, Android, and BlackBerry smartphones and tablets
- Securely access media and files remotely over the Internet
WD My Book Live Duo 6TB Personal Cloud Storage NAS Share Files and Photos
Product Description
WD’s My Book Live Duo personal cloud storage provides dual-drive shared storage on your home network that’s wirelessly accessible from computers, tablets, smartphones, and connected devices.
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
234 of 240 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent NAS Product!
By rbhatta
Western Digital My Book Live Duo 4 TB Personal Cloud Storage Drive by Western Digital reviewed here for Amazon is an Excellent Network attached data storage product. It is very simple to use and consumes very little power ideally suited for home media streaming environments and also doubles as a "Personal Cloud" Storage drive to access your photos and files over the internet.For your background information, I am an "Enterprise Systems Engineer" by profession and work for a global IT company and I have worked with many NAS and SAN products over the years and fully understand the limitations and expectations from customers who use these product lines. It is a nice offering from WD to combine "Personal Cloud" with a NAS product and honestly I am truly impressed by this My Book Live Duo.Here are some PROs and CONs first for some quick overview before we get to the nitty gritty details.PROS[+] Personal Cloud Storage + NAS all-in-one device - Love it![+] Plenty fast enough to play Hi-Def Video files over Gigabit Wired or Wireless-N networks[+] Super Efficient Power usage - Perfect for home environments![+] Extremely Silent operation - No FAN design[+] Capability to have Data Redundancy mode (RAID 1) - Peace of mind![+] High Quality Hardware - Pleasing nice looking "My Book Live" series design.[+] View photos and file with free apps for your iOS and or Android tablets[+] Connect up-to 7 USB HDD devices using a powered USB Hub for additional shares!.CONS:[-] No power off button - This is a minor issue (You can still power off using the GUI)[-] Setting up remote mobile or Personal cloud Access is "multi-step" activation process which can be time consuming and tricky for some - Thankfully you need to do it only once!.Before I talk in great detail about the software portions this product let me tell you that WD Live Duo is fully functional with 4TB RAID 0 SPAN right out of the box without using any software. For experienced users you can completely ignore the included software and get the basic functions as NAS device working without using the software CD (My Book Live Discovery Software + SmartWare etc;) that is provided with the product.If you know how to browse your network and discover the IP address of WD Live Duo you can map network drives and start using the "public" share to store and access you data as guest user without setting up users and additional NAS shares etc;The "public" folder also contains the needed software and you can install all the applications like SmartWare and other packages for windows and Mac to the attached PC's.For others who are not technically inclined, thankfully the include CD "setup" process guides you thru' the full process of setting up your WD Live Duo on your home network.The included "SmartWare" software provides features like backing up your PCs connected to your home network. Software works well and the user interface is simple to use. If you really want to use it to backup your PC files it does work. FYI - It does take considerable amount of time to do a full PC backup. But thankfully, you can customize the time and select the need directories and let it backup when your PC is idle.Personal Cloud feature:=======================This is new buzz word now-a-days that everyone wants to have it in their product. Let me explain what this is and what it can do for you. A "personal cloud" is your "own data" like photos and or that video file of your vacation that you secure at your own location and on your WD Live DUO hard disks and completely under your control. Unlike public clouds which are being offered by multitude of hosted services companies these days, a "personal cloud" feature allows you to keep all your data in one safe place inside your home. Other things you can do are sharing of these files with your family members, streaming these media files remotely, and ability to access your content via Internet from anywhere. Bottom-line: No monthly fees. No "unknown" strange location where your personal data resides. That is "Personal Cloud".WD's "2go" web access software app provides fee-free remote access from My Book Live Duo personal cloud storage. You need to register your device with your name and email, Instructions will be sent by WD via email how to activate it. Once you log in, WD "2go" software mounts My Book Live Duo to your computer like a local drive and your remote folders from your "personal cloud" are available on your Mac or PC.The speed at which you can access your files fully depends on how fast internet connection (Upload speeds are important here) you have at home as well as how fast Internet connectivity (Download speeds are important here) you have at the remote location where you attempted to mount your personal cloud.For most small document transfers, uploading downloading few photos and files it is just perfect. Just do not expect to stream that Hi-definition Blu-Ray Rip remotely :-)Suggestions:============In order to maximize performance you need to disable the services that you do not want to use. For example: I do not want this to be my "Itunes" Server so I disabled it. I also did not use the Media Streaming (DLNA) features so that the box is not busy with those additional tasks.Most of my PC's and Media streaming devices on my home network are capable of mounting SAMBA NAS shares. So there was no real need for WD Live Duo to stream via DLNA.If you want you can pair this up with Western Digital WD TV Live Streaming Media Player and you will be very happy with the results. WD TV Live Streaming Media Player is excellent when it comes to playback of multitude of media files and this Western Digital My Book Live Duo 4 TB Personal Cloud Storage Drive is an excellent storage device.Do not expect to change RAID 0 (SPAN) to RAID 1 (Mirror) instantaneously, the rebuild process takes a very long time (But you can still access the files while the rebuilt takes place in the background with some performance hit)Verdict:========This Product is awesome! - 4 ½ stars!Important Information:======================FYI- There were some batches of WD Live Duo wherein WD did not populate the correct files in the software directory and users got "Runtime" errors when attempting to install the software. Please see my comments section how to resolve that issue.Thanks for reading my review and please feel free to comment if you have any questions.
69 of 70 people found the following review helpful.If you need a NAS for your home, buy this one!
By P. Easter
For those not familiar with exactly what this product is:This is NOT an external hard drive. It is much more than that. If you need an external hard drive, this will not work for you. This is basically a 4 TB file server, or NAS (Network Attached Storage). You attach it to your network via an Ethernet (CAT5e/6) cable. Plug it into your wireless router or a hub/switch on your network. The box says "Access your files wirelessly!". That's a little misleading. There is no wifi on this. That just means that computers on your network that are connected wirelessly can access it. Lame, but whatever.Let me just address the complaints from other reviews:About "Slowness":First you should probably read the manual. It defaults to "Power Saver Mode" which puts the hard drives to "sleep" after a specified idle time. So if your hard drives are "sleeping" there will be some lag in you initial access time. Some clients view this as "disconnected". So if you need instant, constant access to this, turn that feature off. Second, this is for home/home office use. Don't attach this to a business network and expect good performance with several people accessing it all at once. There is a reason business class NAS's cost $10,000+. This costs under $400. Its a "Personal Cloud Storage Drive". I can copy a Blu-Ray rip to this in about 10-20 minutes. I have a Gigabit network.About "No fault tolerance":That is just incorrect. This ships with the drives set up with RAID 0. RAID 0 increases read and write performance, but has no fault tolerance at all. In fact, you are twice as likely to lose all the data on the drives because if one fails, the data on the other drive is useless. However, you can set this up to use RAID 1 (mirroring). You will lose half of your space though. This is just the reality of RAID. Not the products fault. So if you chose to stay with RAID 0 and a drive fails and you lose your data, well its kind of your own fault. You should stay with RAID 0 only if you are backing this thing up. Drives fail. Its just something they do. Deal with it.Anyway, the "Cloud" functionality of this is decent. You can access your files from your iPhone or a web browser. Don't expect to watch a movie from it while on the road. Buy a sling box if you want to do that. I'd like to see more features for the iPhone apps, and the web browser. The web access basically with map a drive to it like Dump Truck or other WebDav type services. But again, this is a $400 product. Don't expect to get a Google server for that price.One problem that I did notice is that if you plug a USB drive into it, you can turn that drive into an additional share on the NAS. However, if that drive is reset, or is removed and plugged back in, it resets the default share name. Maybe I'm asking too much, but it would be nice if it remembered what you named the share. Not a big deal though.I use it as a backup location for all my computers at home. I also use it for media storage. I load it with movies and stream them using a WD TV Live box. It works perfectly for this. I have 2 of these devices and haven't had any problems with them. I have 4 stars instead of 5 because I'd like to see improvements to the "Cloud" features of it. That said, Western Digital is pretty good about updating their products with new firmware that include new features, so I'm sure more "Cloudness" is coming.In conclusion, if you need a NAS for your home, buy this one! Nothing comes close to the features and the price. I'd buy this for the same price even if it didn't include hard drives.
178 of 192 people found the following review helpful.
Great Concept - Dangerously Unstable Execution
By GPVonde
I have had the 6GB Duo for about three weeks now. Though I love the concept, the instability of the system is cause for alarm. Below is a detailed review:THE GOOD:(+) Great Concept(+) Online Access(+) Mobile Apps(+) Large Space(+) RAID redundancy (or so I thought - see THE UGLY below)The concept is great - a personal cloud with fast speed, online secure access, mobile viewing through some nice iOS and Android apps, lots of space, the actual drives are WD Green drives (I have had many and none have failed to date) and the security of Raid 1 redundancy over two 3TB drives. Should one of the drives fail, in less than 5 minutes either drive can be easily removed and replaced (using a matching drive - an easily found and inexpensive WD Green 3TB drive).I own a photography studio where we run a four-machine PC network. I'm always searching for the best way to efficiently and safely store our material. We are especially keen on ensuring our data is as safe as possible from corruption or loss. We've used a variety of systems and processes over the years, and were excited to see the release of this product as it seemed the perfect balance of security, accessibility, redundancy and speed. Unfortunately, the product did not meet my expectations, as you can read below.THE BAD:(-) Laggy Speed(-) Buggy Apps(-) Limited Control(-) Drive Runs Very HotWe received the drive and quickly began migrating our data to the new system. Overall, my initial impression was good. It was pretty simple to setup and the conversion to RAID1 was simply a click of a button. In total, we transferred about 1.2 TB of data in chunks over the course of several days. However, once we started using the drive, I was surprised by how slow it was. We work with substantial quantities of large files, so the slowness was a serious issue and resulted in us having to rework our process to avoid the lag. Not ideal.Another issue is that there is no button, or any way to turn off the system or put it into sleep mode in a way that ensures a safe shutdown. As a result, you are instructed in the manual to guess by the front LED indicator that it's not currently writing and can be shut down. Not the most user friendly.THE UGLY:(in my experience really, really ugly)(X) Dangerously Unstable in RAID configuration(X) No Fail-safes(X) Dual Drive Corruption possible(X) Risk of Total Data LossAbout a week ago, we had an issue where our machines (Windows 7) where the drive was offline and could not be accessed. However, after shutting down all the computers and the WD Duo, then rebooting the DUO, waiting 3 minutes, then booting the other machines, we were able to access the Duo without an issue. Then yesterday happened. The same issue occurred and we went through the same process, but this time the drive would not respond. We tried again. Still nothing. To make a long story shorter, we discovered that the front LED indicator was indicating the drive to be stuck in the booting process. Both drives were corrupted. Looking into this issue, it is unfortunately very common among previous WD Live drives and the only viable solution is sending it to a data recovery service, which can cost anywhere from about $500 to $2500 depending on the amount of data and extent of the damage. Very, uber not good...Luckily, if you find yourself in a similar pinch, I have found the following software to be helpful in recovering the data yourself (though you need to be able to put one of the two drives into your desktop computer in order to do anything). The program is called Raise Data Recovery for Ext2/3/4. I have been able to recover most of the content, though anything that I have edited on the WD Dus is either not detected or unreadable. But hey, I was looking forward to redoing two weeks worth of work.The frustrating thing is that this didn't have to happen. WD could have easily put in a partition or even a built-in bit of memory to house a backup boot system, should the drives become corrupted. This would at least allow you to do diagnostic work. Hopefully, the next version will have such a feature.
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