Western Digital My Book: Difference between revisions

Content deleted Content added

Inline

Revision as of 22:30, 11 September 2008

A My Book Essential Edition External Hard Drive

My Book is a series of external hard drives produced by Western Digital. There are currently eight series of My Book drives; Essential Edition, Home Edition, Office Edition, Mirror Edition, Studio Edition, Premium Edition, Pro Edition and the World Edition.

My Book drives are designed to look like a standard black hardback book, with the exception of the Pro series which are silver and the World series which are white. Other than the book-like appearance of the drive's case, My Book drives feature vent holes on the top of the drives which spell out a message in Morse code.

Classic Editions

Essential Edition

In addition to the book-like design, the My Book Essential Edition drives have an Intelligent Power Management feature that stops the drive platters after ten minutes of inactivity, rather than the usual expedient of slowing them down. The unit also turns on and off with the computer it is attached to.

Essential Edition My Book drives are almost entirely black, with the exception of a single blue light, used to indicate power, that surrounds the power button on the front of the drive. It stinks.

Premium Edition

Premium Edition drives are similar to the Essential Edition model but also include Firewire 400 ports, an integrated visual capacity gauge and Western Digital backup software.

Premium Edition My Book drives have the same black case as Essential Edition drives, however, the light surrounding the power button is blue. Also, inside the standard blue light is another blue ring light that contains 8 individual segments which indicate the remaining space on the drive.

Premium ES Edition

My Book Premium ES Edition drives are nearly identical to their Premium Edition counterparts, the only difference being that the ES line features a single eSATA connection instead of the dual Firewire 400 ports present on the Premium Edition, allowing computers with available eSATA ports to transfer data at speeds of up to 3 Gb/s.

Pro Edition

The Pro Edition My Books contain all of the features of the Premium Edition ones, but with added Firewire 800 connectivity for fast data transfer. In addition, the Pro Edition My Books replace the Western Digital backup software found on the Premium Editions with EMC Retrospect Express backup and recovery software.

Pro Edition My Book drives have the same basic case design as Premium Edition drives; however, the case is silver rather than black. In addition, it includes a circular blue capacity gauge LED divided into six segments (representing 17% of usage per segment) and an outer ring that represents drive activity.

Though the "Pro Edition MyBook" is marketed as a raid solution that can be used a backup device, very serious reliability issues occur frequently. ^[1]^[2]^[3]

The dreaded "click, click, click of death" is the phrase now associated with the most recent problem with these drives. It often occurs after the installation of Western Digital's own firmware updates to these drives. Once installed, the firmware update renders the drive unmountable and useless to its owners.

To date, Western Digital has offered its affected customers one of two options:

1. Returning their drives to Western Digital and LOSING ALL DATA, or 2. Sending the drive to one of Western Digital's "partners" who provide Data Recovery services for $2,000 or more.

These "Pro" drives can no longer be accessed because of the faulty Western Digital firmware update, but rather than providing a solution to its customers that restores functionality and access to important user data Western Digital's policy so far is to offer a $15 coupon on new purchases of $150 and to direct their customers to pay above and beyond the high anxiety incurred by these "updates" and the time lost due to the inability to access the data. As of May 29, 2008, Western Digital has not offered a meaningful solution to its customers. ^[4]

Some versions have been incompatible with MacOS for some users on some hardware. Please see post here:^[5]. It appears that current products in the line are compatible with MacOS.

World Edition

The World Edition My Books function as Network-attached storage (NAS), by way of an ethernet interface. They also feature an extra USB host port to allow additional USB drives to be daisychained. It is accessed as a CIFS/SMB shared folder.

In addition to the access as a shared folder, the World Edition uses WD Anywhere Access to gain remote access to the drive via the internet - although this limits the file types that can be accessed.^[6] Furthermore it can't transfer single files larger than 500MBs (WD confirmed that and asks clients to use smaller than 500MBs files). In case someone tries to transfer a 500+MBs file the disk will lock and a hardware reset is needed.

It has the same basic case design as the Premium Edition drives, including the capacity gauge, except the color of the World Edition is white. It also has the same Morse code ventilation as the other editions.

Network Speed

Although MyBook Ethernet-capable disks come with a Gigabit Ethernet interface, it seems the network speed is slower, because of the limited CPU capacity to handle data, as WD Support seems to have answered a customer.^[7]

Internals

This drive runs BusyBox Linux on an Oxford Semiconductor 0XE800 ARM chip which has the ARM926EJ-S core. In addition it uses a Via Cicada Simpliphy vt6122 Gigabit ethernet chipset, and a Hynix 32 Mbit DDR Syncronous DRAM chip. The webserver is the lighttpd server. The drives of the World Edition are ext3 formatted, which means that the drive can be mounted as a standard drive from within Linux if removed from the casing and installed in a normal PC.

Extending capabilities

The device can be 'unlocked' and accessed via SSH terminal, meaning that the WD MioNet java-based software can be disabled so the device can be run with an unrestricted Linux OS,^[8] at the cost of voiding the warranty.^[9] The unlocking makes it possible to install other software on MyBook (i.e. run a different webserver or an ftp server (such as vsftpd) on it, use NFS for mounting shared directories natively from Unix, or even install a bitTorrent client such as rTorrent,^[10] etc.)

Edition II My Books

In addition to the regular My Book drives, Western Digital has also released special high-capacity "Edition II" versions of the Premium,^[11] Pro,^[12] and World^[13] Edition My Books. In addition to the features present in the respective My Book edition, these drives feature two 500 GB RAID-configured hard disks which can be selected by the end user as RAID 0 (Data striping), or RAID 1 (Data mirroring), depending on personal preference. If selected as RAID 0, the end user has 1Tb of available storage. Either way, if one of the internal drives of the Edition II My Books fails, it can be easily removed and replaced by the user without voiding the warranty. Western Digital uses this feature to their advantage, claiming that their drives needn't be returned for costly service in the case of a drive failure.^[14]

New Editions

In Late 2007, Western Digital introduced a new line of My Book drives. These included the Essential Edition 2.0, Home Edition, Office Edition, and Studio Editions, and ranged in capacity from 320Gb to 2Tb. As some dealers offer the new edition My Book encased HD for a lower price than that of the plain HD it contains, customers have been known to purchase My Book drives, dismantling them, and using them in an internal bay in a PC or media device.^[15] The Home Edition features an Oxford 934 chipset.

Morse Code

The Morse Code message written into the drive case is made up of a selection of the words 'personal', 'reliable', 'innovative', 'simple', and 'design'.^[16] The first occurrence of 'innovative' on the My Book Pro and My Book World Edition features an error and reads 'innovateve'.^[17]

References

External links

[1] Big problems with the WD My Book Pro Edition II

[2] Western Digital MyBook Open Case Recover Data

[3] Western Digital unveils slimmer, sleeker My Book lineup

[4] Western Digital Buggy Firmware

[5] [1]

[6] Anywhere Access FAQ

[7] WD Support answer about Network Speed slowness

[8] MyBook World Edition Community of Wikidot

[9] Hacking Western Digital MyBook World Edition

[10] How to install rtorrent on a mybookworld

[11] My Book Premium Edition II

[12] My Book Pro Edition II

[13] My Book World Edition II

[14] .Western Digital Service and Support - How to dismantle a My Book Pro Edition II, My Book Premium Edition II, or My Book World Edition II to replace a hard drive.

[15] How to open the case and remove the hard drive from a Western Digital My Book exteranl enclosure » CarltonBale.com

[16] Morse Code explanation on official Western Digital My Book Webpage.

[17] vnunet.com Review - Western Digital My Book Essential Edition

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]

[9]

[10]

[11]

[12]

[13]

[14]

[15]

[16]

[17]

@@ Line 10: / Line 10: @@
 In addition to the book-like design, the ''My Book Essential Edition'' drives have an ''Intelligent [[Power Management]]'' feature that stops the [[drive platter]]s after ten minutes of inactivity, rather than the usual expedient of slowing them down. The unit also turns on and off with the computer it is attached to.
-Essential Edition My Book drives are almost entirely black, with the exception of a single blue light, used to indicate power, that surrounds the power button on the front of the drive.
+Essential Edition My Book drives are almost entirely black, with the exception of a single blue light, used to indicate power, that surrounds the power button on the front of the drive.  It stinks.
 === Premium Edition ===