Western Digital has earned its name as one of the most reliable hard drives in the industry. With the evolution of personal storage, Western Digital has continued to develop products for the home market. The Western Digital My Book Live 3 TB Personal Cloud Storage Drive is an offering of theirs in the home network attached storage space. Here’s our review
Price Range: $195 – $210
Overall Rating 3.5 out of 5 stars
Dimensions: 6.6 x 2 x 5.5 inches ; 3.3 pounds
Includes all parts you need (power, network cable, etc)
Fairly easy plug and play setup
3-year warranty by Western Digital
Western Digital My Book Live 3 TB Personal Cloud Storage Drive Product Description
Western Digital makes some of the easiest to use plug and play home network storage devices in the industry. For those that need some beefier storage, the Western Digital My Book Live Personal Cloud Storage Drives come in 1 TB, 2 TB, and 3 TB which is this review though the chassis and drives are for the most part the same above average quality.
When it comes to personal NAS devices, the Western Digital My Book Live is one of the more reliable home NAS systems on the market and has some of the nicer features. It’s as simple as connecting the network attached storage to your wireless router for shared storage accessibility from all the computers and devices on your network. It is compatible with both Windows OS and Mac OS. DLNA enabled devices welcome. And for accessing files remotely, even from your tablets and phones, the Western Digital WD 2GO application and website gives you “cloud” ability.
A few nicer features include: faster storage access than previous NAS devices with the built-in 800Mhz CPU. Wireless backups using Apple Time Machine or for Windows WD SmartWare.
Western Digital My Book Live 3 TB Drive PROS AND CONS
PROS
- 800Mhz CPU on the cloud device acts as a nice speedup
- DLNA 1.5 & UPnP™ certified for your HDTV streaming access
- Includes iTunes server support
- Auto-detect crossover included – this means you can connect direct to your computer also with a straight cable (no crossover cable needed)
- Western Digital offers a 3-year warranty. Also, they continue to update their software and drivers to keep accessibility up to date and to keep setup very easy.
CONS
- As with any non redundant RAID storage, this should be considered a single point of failure and you will still want to keep two copies of all your important data. For me that usually means buying two of the same storage to keep two copies of my data
- As is with most of the GUI on NAS devices (except for Synology) the GUI can be a bit slow and kludgy. GUI development do not seem to be a priority for most home NAS devices. Requires patience and some determination to use the GUI for initial setup
- Western Digital tends to be slightly pricier than other NAS devices.
Overall, the Western Digital My Book Live 3 TB Drive and all of the My Book Live devices are slightly pricier than their counterparts. That being said, what you are buying is an above average quality network attached storage that from a vendor that keeps its drivers and applications up to date. The 3 year warranty is very nice also. It’s easy to see that Western Digital continues to have its network attached storage products in the top 5 bestseller lists on retail giants like Amazon. Good choice for a home network attached storage device.
What Buyers Are Saying
“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… (READ MORE)”
“The first thing the installer did was check for an update. One was available, so I let it install it. This took about 25 minutes. This step can be skipped, but it’s always a good idea to install updates. After that was completed I created a couple of user accounts – quick and easy. You can create private storage accounts, public, and pick who has access to what accounts. So little Billy can’t see his sister’s stuff, or each employee can have a private and public storage area. Really handy and well executed. The interface, although web based, is a little clunky. For the price, you can’t go wrong – great bang for the buck…(READ MORE)”
“I bought a WD My Book Live 3 tb drive about a week ago from Amazon and started the installation process last night. After unsuccessfully messing with drive for over an hour I was starting to consider ways that I could set it on fire. I then called tech support, anticipating that they would simply blame Microsoft and tell me that it was MS’s fault. I was sure wrong about that. The WD Tech first asked me what I wanted to do with the drive. I told her and after remotely logging in to my computer she got busy…reconfiguring my system so that the My Book Live would work. I wish I could tell you what she did but it was clearly over my head. Everything is now working perfectly and I couldn’t have done it without WD Tech Support. This is the first review I have ever posted and I’m doing so because this was the best Tech Support I have ever experienced… (READ MORE)”
OVERALL RATING: 3.5 out of 5 stars.
For full details or to buy the Western Digital My Book Live 3 TB Personal Cloud Storage Drive now, click here
Most orders are eligible free shipping.
Source of Buyer Reviews and Description: Amazon.com
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