Western Digital WDBACG0020HCH-NESN My Book Live Home Network Drive

Comment:
I initially was skeptical about purchasing a NAS for my home network, but I decided to try one of these drives when the price was nearly the same as a desktop 2TB drive. I also upgraded my home network to gigabit at the same time. File transfer speeds over wired gigabit connections reach 40-80 MB/sec (megaBYTE, not megabit)!From my MacBook pro over it's wireless N I can get speeds of about 10MB/sec read/write, which is fast enough for most things.After playing around with this drive I have determined it was perfect for a home network and for work. I purchased several more for my work, to sit on the network in a secure location and to act as an "off-site" backup server for my Linux server machines (you can access the WDLive by IP address). This proved simple and easy to setup with a script to ensure the drive is mounted and I backup the entire server hourly off-site.Recently I decided to upgrade my Popcorn Hour setup to include these network drives on my home network so that I could have more videos available to each TV in my house. These drives work better than the internal storage on the Popcorn Hour C200's I have at home. I've decided to upgrade my many 2TB drives into these units, and keep the "internal" 3.5 inch drives in a safe for backup. It's a lot easier and faster to access these WDLive 2TB volumes than any other file sharing method I have tried (for speed, ease of connection, power consumption, and noise/fan spindown).Overall, I highly recommend these devices, but like other reviewers comment, there really is no way to automatically backup the unit itself. Better keep a spare 2TB drive and manually back it up regularly.

Comment:
Huge amount of storage for the price, but accessing ALL the files is tough. If you have a few computers backed up to the nas, you can't access those files from another computer through WD's GUI. I'm sure there is a way, I just figured simple would have been best.

Comment:
A NAS device is something I don't know how I've lived without, and wish I had bought years ago. I built a new computer with a 120GB SSD and decided I wanted more storage space without the noise of a mechanical hard drive.Apparently this drive has lots of features but I've never used most of them. I just access the drive via Samba using Windows Explorer. The only setup I did was to set a password, assign an IP address and set the drive to go into sleep mode after some time of unuse.I chose this drive because reviews stated it was particularly fast, and especially so for the price. The only downside is it has no USB port to attach additional hard drives, for backing up the NAS or adding more space. I just keep an older USB drive on top of my tower, and turn it on when I'm making backups.

Comment:
From looking at the cons you may think that being saddled with Western Digital's drive interface software on each client is a negative, but the truth is that the basic feature set of network-accessible storage can be configured with a web interface that doesn’t require any software installation at all. For those of us looking for basic storage, this drive handles admirably, provided you remember that this is not a high-end NAS. It packs a great many features for its size, such as remote access and support for various streaming services, but I doubt I’ll explore them as I have little need for that at the moment.The only quibble I’ve had so far is that the WD unit takes its sweet time when accessing the unit’s configuration pages via the web, but for those looking for simple network storage, this isn’t a bad unit at all. I do wonder what will happen when the drive fails—as it will, since it’s a mechanical device—and it becomes necessary to evacuate the data from it, but hopefully that happens far in the future.