Western Digital My Book World Edition II

We fondly recall reviewing this unit’s connected brother in arms, the My Book Pro Edition II (March 2007). The products are virtually identical, featuring two 500GB hard drives locked in a RAID 0 configuration that gives you one honkin’ terabyte of space. The difference, of course, is that you access the World Edition II through an Ethernet cable instead of a FireWire or USB connection.

A little piece of software called MioNet serves as the gateway between your computer and this NAS box. We love how it effortlessly allows you to share folders from your My Book with anyone you want via an awesome web-based interface. But that’s all it does unless you want to open up your wallet. Yes, that’s right, to share folders that are on your computer and access other functions, like remote login to any PC with MioNet installed, you have to pay the piper—$7 a month or $65 a year. Say it slowly now: What. The. Hell.

Worse still, we have good reason to believe that MioNet cripples the My Book’s performance. It takes the My Book forever to load up and be recognized by the program, and sometimes the connection doesn’t even occur. For some strange reason, the drive won’t show up in Windows Explorer but will be accessible through the Manage Devices option in MioNet.

Considering it took an average of 12:42 (min:sec) to transfer 3.6GB (475 files), we remain thoroughly unimpressed with the My Book World. A pity, really; we had such high hopes.