Western Digital Personal Cloud <-- Killer!

I picked up a Western Digital "Personal Cloud" Mybook Live Duo. This thing is great!

I needed a nice whole-home storage solution and they offer the thing in 6TB, with dual drives. (I opted to Raid 1 them, for 3TB Mirrored Redundancy, easy, 1 button to do the conversion.)

The setup of the unit is super easy. Plug it in the Ethernet near your switch. Use the CD in the box and it finds it and goes into setup. Takes about 10 minutes and the box is up and running as a full feature NAS on your home network.

Now.. That's not extraordinary in itself.. But the next piece is.

It has a user management interface that lets you create accounts on it. You can then opt to have it uplink with western digital as a intermediary for the unit, for free. Then you just assign an email address to your accounts and tell it to invite them.

In your inbox you get a link to the WD Site to verify your account.. And you have an instant web interface to your home Drive. You can pull up all of your files over the web, upload, download.. the whole nine yards from the browser. (Or FTP, or JAVA) Simple enough for anyone.. no messing with your router, port forwarding or anything since WD acts as the go-between.

Really wicked little device.

Personal Cloud Storage Overview

 

Very nice. Sounds like a no-hassle WHS box. How much does it cost?

I just hope hard drive prices start dropping again soon. I'd so much love to get 4x4TB RAID 5 on my WHS. Just transferring from my WHS v1 to WHS 2011 and going to have 6x2TB RAID 5. But six drives + system drive is a LOT of drives.

 

It was pretty cheap, IMO, since it has 2, 3TB drives in it. I gave $479 for it at Newegg.

Couple other notes, it runs pretty cool, and is very quiet too. Other than the little green LED in the front, you would hardly notice it. Its not much bigger than Three, 3.5" desktop drives side-by-side.

 

I agree. I think for the home now with everything networked, a NAS is the way to go. A lot of other devices are also DLNA enabled so you can access everything on common devices like tvs, blu-ray players etc...

I have a Synology device with mirrored 1 TB drives and share files in the home and now, use it as my only place to store all my files/music/videos.

One reason no need for a large amount of space on a local laptop hard drive.

 

The more i use this WD, the more i like it. My Wife's Macbook Air picked it right up with no setup. She downloaded the iPhone App and it connected right up too. (You go to the console for the WD and it gives you an activation code, type it in the phone and it connects). Works well, so she has full access to the cloud from all of her Fruity Devices.

 

What are the transfer speeds like?

If this thing can saturate gigabit ethernet (110-125 megabytes per second sustained), then we have a winner.

 

It has a Gigabit Port, but my home network is mostly Wireless (Cisco Aironet 1100), with a 10/100 Switch & Router. So i can't really stress test it on the Gigabit side.

I do know that i can have 3 PCs over the wifi pushing down files to it steady all at the same time and the NAS doesn't hesitate at all. But, again.. Not sure about the sustained specs, as i don't have the LAN side hardware to push it.