Western Digital My Book Live Duo 4TB Review: Limited Features, Lots of Capacity - campbelltorcer

At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

• Affordable network storage
• Fast moving

Cons

• No USB 3.0 operating room eSATA ports

Our Verdict

This two-true laurel box offers much of capacity for the buck and streams large files all right, merely features are otherwise limited.

The two-bay Western Digital My Book Live Duo 4TB covers the basics well, and does so for a lot inferior than most competing NAS boxes. Priced at just $380 (as of March 23, 2012), it's promiscuous to configure, provides all of the sharing features that most home and small-office users require, streams media well, and has strong stand-in capabilities. It too provides accession to files from fluid devices, and it turned in very good performance when reading extensive files.

The My Rule book Live Duad ships in maximum capacity mode, meaning that the twin 2TB drives are configured for spanning, or JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks), where the network uses the second drive only if the first it full. This is a bit safer than Foray 0 striping of data across some drives, where single drive's failure means the expiration of information on both. Simply it's not as safe as RAID 1 mirroring mode, which the My Holy Scripture Live Duo besides supports. Mirroring reduces content away half–to 2TB in this display case–but it as wel enables you to continue exploitation the box if a labour fails.

Western Digital provides mobile access to shared out files on the My Book Know Duo via its WD2go Web portal. The company offers free apps for both IOS and Android devices, though the pro versions of those app, which store files locally for offline use, cost $3 each. You May as wel directly access the My Book Live Duo's HTML interface remotely, every bit with most other NAS boxes.

Of course, acquiring 4TB of storage for the same cost as some driveless, pro-level boxes means that you won't find many high features. The building block supports USB 2.0 but non USB 3.0 Beaver State eSATA, which makes the process of backing up the box more tedious. IT also lacks Web serving, one-button copying of shoot drives, and Rsync for mirroring data with remote boxes. On the nonnegative side–and other for a consumer-degree WD box–the My Book Live Duo makes information technology easy to swap drives by popping the top cover and coitus interruptus the drive tray.

With an 800MHz PowerPC Central processing unit and 256MB of memory, the My Book Elastic Duo soured in an excellent large-file read performance, treatment our 10GB file at 91.1 megabytes per second. In other tests, IT fell more in line with similarly priced boxes from Buffalo and LaCie, writing the 10GB data file to its platters at 46 MBps, reading our 10GB mix of files and folders at 36.2 MBps, and penning that merge at 28.1 MBps. The life-size-file read speed bodes well for streaming audio or video to multiple locations, but information technology makes WD's NAS box less suitable for financial support up or copying large amounts of data.

The My Book Live Duo is great for dwelling house users World Health Organization want to stream media; merely minor-business users volition be better served by a box that delivers faster overall performance and has more-advanced features. Bank note: Seriously consider switching the box to maximum protection mode (mirroring) if you architectural plan to store anything irreplaceable on it; what you sacrifice in content you'll gain in peace of mind.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/469408/western_digital_my_book_live_duo_4tb_review_limited_features_lots_of_capacity.html

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