Cheap Western Digital My Book World Edition 4 TB (2 x 2 TB) Network Attached Storage WDH2NC40000N (White)

I purchased the NAS MyBook WEII a few weeks with the intention of using for mostly backups and I have to say I'm not really satisfied with its performance for this purpose. Having said that, once I found out about its media server capabilities, I started liking it.

The not-so-great stuff: Backups
If you intend to use the product for large backups via ethernet, you'd better have a Gigabit router. Otherwise the backup of entire partitions of your hard drives will take forever. The device does not offer Gigabit support out of the box and you have to update the firmware to get it. No problem, though, the firmware update was smooth and it worked fine. I configured Norton Ghost to back up single-file backups to the MBWEII. After backing up about 450 GB, I found out the files copied to the device were somehow corrupt. Also the device froze a few times and the only way to make it work is by unplugging the power cable. Definitely not cool. I read somewhere this could be related to the server not being able to handle extremely large files. I will need to configure Norton Ghost to split backups and see how that works.

The good thing is that you can connect an external USB hard drive to the device so I backed up my partitions to one I already had then copied the data to the MBWEII by using the Copy Manager. It worked fine, it took a lot less time (since the files were copied via USB) but I would have preferred backing up my data directly to the MBWEII.

The good stuff: Media server, FTP, Download functionality
I enabled the media server on the MBWEII and it works great with the PS3. I have watched hours and hours of videos with no lag whatsoever. It's just great.

I also enabled the built-in FTP server and it works fine. However I have a 10/100 Mbit router and wired PCs but the transfer rate of large files was never above 7 MB/s. Most of the time it was around 5.5 MB/s which is a bit disappointing. But I'm glad the functionality is there and I intend to use it to access my files anywhere.

Another plus: you can configure the MBWEII to automatically download files via HTTP/FTP or torrents. Torrent users will love this functionality. Upload your torrents to the device and let it download your files to the share of your choice while your computer is off.

All in all, I think this is a pretty good product. If you want it just for backups, I do not recommend it at all because getting a large amount of data to the device is too much of a hassle (it shouldn't have to be). An external hard drive with Firewire connection is more suitable. But its solid media-serving capabilities are just too good to ignore and I strongly recommend it for couch potatoes like myself. Downloaders will certainly appreciate it too.Get more detail about Western Digital My Book World Edition 4 TB (2 x 2 TB) Network Attached Storage WDH2NC40000N (White).