Review: Western Digital’s My Book Live
By Branko Miletic
Western Digital’s latest mass media storage drive, the My Book Live, is a sound product, if at times overtly simplistic.
The install was a breeze – once I hooked it up to my router and then plugged the unit in, the install screen came up and asked all the right questions – and this was before I had loaded the installation CD into the PC. So from my Win XP PC, I was able to connect to the drive via a Win 7 Laptop and an OSX MacBook Pro.
OK, now for the fun. Not only was I able to have a 1TB shared NAS drive across three computers, but I could then also download the WD2GO app and share all my digital stuff across the cloud to any smart phone anywhere in the world – this was too easy.
The My Book Live is a simple, wonderful, useful – and dare I say inexpensive – piece of kit at $169 for the 1TB version. The unit is also built with an 800MHz CPU to power all your applications from streaming to remote access.
You can also use the built-in media server to stream music, photos and movies to any DLNA-capable multimedia device such as a WD TV Live network media player, Blu-ray disc player, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 and also most Smart TVs.
If you are like me, you have your iTunes on your Mac, which is the only computer I have connected to some seriously cool speakers, then the My Book Live will allow you to stream your iTunes as well as your to any Mac or PC with iTunes installed.
This new NAS storage device from Western Digital is a useful piece of tech and the only question I have is why did it take so many crappy product launches before WD finally got it right?
Pros: easy to use, great capacity, can become your media server
Cons: needs a USB port to add more storage and it could come in different colours
4 Shacks Out Of 5
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