Western Digital My Book Live
AnandTech review
As I have previously posted, I have one of my older PC's (an Athlon 64 3200+ box) acting as a sort of NAS box, a Library, with four 320GB hard drives in RAID-5 configuration, resulting in approx 875GiB of useful redundant storage.
In addition to that, a few years ago, for media storing purposes, I put together a SATA-to-USB box and a 500GB WD Green drive in it.
However, now that I have bought Samsung's 46" LED-TV (EH5450W), which is also a PVR, I realized that I need an external HDD for the PVR functionality, and since it does not really have to be very big, the above mentioned 500GB box suit the purpose best.
I needed to move the stuff on that drive to somewhere else. The Library machine was out of the question, as my digital photos, documents and source code takes a lot of space there already and the RAID-5 redundancy is more important for this kind of content. It was therefore time to get a new external HDD.
At first I thought of getting WD My Book Essential drive, as I had some experience with it previously. Deciding to go with 3TB version, I was a bit worried about the max 30GiB/s transfer speeds inherent to USB2, as my machine lacks any USB3 ports.
Fortunately though, the Essential drives were currently out of circulation and I was offered a My Book Live instead. Back then, I only knew that the Essential is accessed through USB and the Live through the network. But in fact, they are very different beasts indeed. While the My Book Essential has only SATA-to-USB bridge in the box beside the drive, the Live is actually a whole independent PC, with 800MHz PowerPC 464 processor, 256MiB of memory and a Gigabit LAN port. It is running a ppc version of Debian Linux.
In addition to exposing the contents of the 3TB WD Green drive via Samba, also NFS is supported (though it is considerably slower apparently thanks to the NFS inherent encrypted data transfers). SSH access into the machine is also available. It also has web server, which includes nice UI for changing the settings of the NAS. And it has a media server, so my Smart TV picked it up automatically and was able to play back the media I had already copied there.
I was really surprised by this device. The transfer speeds are much higher than USB2, reaching an average of 65MiB/s and going sometimes as high as 80MiB/s. The whole device is also almost totally silent, save some HDD head moving sound.
A bit worrying are the temperature readings, as after long coping stuff into the device, the hddtemp reports up to 65 degrees Celsius. Under normal operation, however, the drive is mostly sleeping and the temperature drops considerably.
I highly recommend this drive!
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