Western Digital My Book Live Duo External Drive
The My Book Live Duo Personal Cloud Storage is the latest and hottest product from the storage giants Western Digital. This product is, as the name indicates, a two bay personal cloud storage expanding on the company’s range of single bay My Book Live. With this device, the engineers have clubbed the advantages of remote access and shared storage by having a double safe backup and boosted capacity of a dual system with RAID.
Design:
Design wise, we hope that you are aware this Western Digital My Book Live Duo is no portable storage. It is not only one of the chunkiest we have seen, but the strongest to live for a while. It is quite big with dimensions of (H x W x D) 165mm x 157mm x 99mm. As you might be aware, the device connects directly to your router using gigabit Ethernet, to share everything in the drive using home network. The package includes a USB2.0 port to extended its capacity further or just transfer the files.
Capacity:
The Western Digital My Book Live Duo Personal Cloud Storage is currently available in two flavours of capacities of 4TB and 6TB.
Features:
The My Book Live Duo Personal Cloud Storage sports an 800MHz CPU providing automatic backup for the Windows users through the Western Digital SmartWare Software. The Mac users too have not been left in the cold, as they can use Apple Time Machine.
The Duo Personal Cloud Storage:
While the original version, the Western Digital My Book Live impressed the market with its great deal of functionality as well as mobile app support, for that kind of money, it came under criticism for the absence of any built-in back-up support in case of a crashed backup. It left the experts in dilemma considering the fact that the Applied Micro APM82181 NAS Platform was definitely more than just capable of the ordinary NAS functionalities.
One of the major advantages of having the Western Digital My Book Live Duo External Hard Drive is its double safe backup which always maintains another copy of all of your data for real-time back-up in mirrored mode, which is RAID1. While one half of the available storage is used to store the user’s data, the second half if used for the storage of the duplicate copy. In case one of your drives fail, then all of your data will be protected as all of it is duplicated on the second drive. If you are not a big fan of having two copies, Western Digital has the Spanning mode, with which you will be able to combine both of the drives into one huge storage space for making the most of the available space.
Media server:
One of the bells and whistles that Western Digital My Book Live Duo has to offer is its built-in media server, using which you will be able to stream in photos, videos, movies as well as audio to any of the DLNA approved multimedia device. The choice of DLNA certified multimedia devices are huge, you get the WD TV Live Streaming media player, PS3, Xbox 360, Blu-ray players as well as smart TVs. One sweet advantage of the media server is that, you will be able to stream your tablet and smartphone right from the MyBook Live Duo with the WD 2go mobile app which you can purchase from iTunes as well as the Android markets.
Warranty:
Western Digital offers three years warranty for My Book Live Duo Personal Cloud’s parts and labour.
Verdict:
The WD My Book Live Duo Personal Storage lives up to the words of Chris Bull, director of marketing for Western Digital. It is the ideal, overall entertainment and storage solution for today’s fully connected consumer. The device provides safe back-up and also access and share data from anywhere from your tablet or smartphone.
For the complete detailed review of the WD My Book Live Duo Personal Storage, check back soon.
Western Digital My Book Live Duo – Technical Specification Table
| Manufacturer | Western Digital |
| Model Name | WD Digital My Book World Live Duo Personal Cloud Storage |
| Model Numbers | 6TB – WDBVHT0060JCH 4TB – WDBVHT0040JCH |
| Drive type | Personal Cloud Storage |
| Capacities Available | 4TB and 6TB |
| Dimensions (H x W x D) | 165mm x 157mm x 99mm |
| OS Compatibility | Windows XP (SP3), Windows Vista, Windows 7, Mac OS X Leopard, Snow Leopard, or Lion |
| Interface | Gigabit Ethernet |
| Ethernet | 10/100/1000 Mb/s |
| Software included | WD SmartWare |
| Features | Media share Double safe backup Drive spanning Complete out of box storage Streaming to HDTV User serviceable |
| Supported browsers | Internet Explorer 7.0 or higher, Safari 4.0 or higher, Firefox 3.6 or higher, Google Chrome 14.0 and later on supported Windows and Mac OS platforms |
| Warranty | 3 years |
March 19th, 2012 at 5:14 am
Thanks for sharing. Really helps me a lot.