Western Digital My Book Live Duo 4TB Review : NAS for the masses

Protecting digital data is a matter of concern these days. Not only it requires time and effort but it in some cases this might cost a fortune. Western Digital,the pioneer in providing storage solutions had announced the My Book Live Duo earlier this year for ₹24,999 in India. My Book Live Duo is a Network Attached Storage with less features for a NAS and affordable pricing. We tried this device for a few days and have our experience with the device written in words which can be read below.

Sales Package:

We shot an unboxing video to show what al you have inside the box. The video uploaded can be viewed below:

Features:

WD My Book Live Duo has dual bay inlets which means there are two slots where the SATA hard drives can be plugged in. The testing unit we had was the 4TB model which has twin WD Caviar Green 2TB hard drives which offer low power consumption and less noise, to be honest we could hardly hear the drives spinning while the operations performed.

Network Attached Storage commonly abbreviated as NAS is a storage solution which allows the data to be shared when connected to the network in a secure manner. My Book Live Duo being a NAS allows this along with further additional features.
It connects to the home network via the Ethernet cable and becomes an entertainment hub by which users can stream their data anytime anywhere they want through remote access. The connection made is very secure so you don’t have to worry about your device being hacked or something but still we can’t completely agree to this.
Remote access to the drive is handled by WD web interface www.wd2go.com and mobile apps for Android and iOS. Users can directly stream from the apps to their mobile device but if they need the data for off-line storage they have to buy the pro version of the application. It also supports streaming to any DLNA-certified multimedia device such as smart TVs, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 which expands its use case.

Performance

WD My Book Live Duo has a 800MHz PowerPC CPU and 256MB of memory which gave unexpected results when we tested the product. The transfer speeds were surprisingly good and were above normal. Unfortunately it does not support USB 3.0 or eSATA therefore backing up data can be a tedious task. It also lacks Web serving, one-button copying of flash drives, and Rsync for mirroring data with remote boxes but instead it has the mirroring within the drive itself.
My book Live Duo offers two options: Maximum protection and Maximum storage. Maximum protection does the mirroring of data within the drive itself so it actively makes copies of the data been stored to provide a backup which exactly slice the storage capacity by half. Maximum storage on the other hand splits data across both drives so we can enjoy the read and write performance of both drives when working with data i.e. two drives – drive A and drive B would each store half of a 100MB file (50/50) if we take it as an example.

Setting up the network drive was easy and do not require much time. The PC/Mac software package which comes bundled with the drive handles everything for you. The software package includes certain additional inputs like WD SmartWare to backup files where users can set the amount of space limited for backup and use the rest for storage. One can setup accounts to make users access WD Software and eventually access data on the drive. Users need this account to remotely access the drive through mobile and web app keeping the data secure to unauthorized access. We did not face any issues using the mobile apps or the web app and found it very user friendly but the performance in the end depends on your internet connection because it’s all through the air.

Conclusion:

Getting this box at a price of just the drives looks definitely promising. The device launched at ₹24,999 as MRP but is available for ₹22,000 as seen on online retail websites. We found the performance of the device pretty good especially as compared to what NAS costs. It seems to work impressively for streaming audio or video across multiple devices but comes short when backup is on with maximum protection. Mirroring though is good practice to play safe but depends on your usage. The My Book Live Duo is great for home users who want to stream media; but small-businesses or start-ups might like something better served that delivers faster overall performance and has more-advanced features.
Looking at Indian scenario this might look pricey for a network attached hard drive but features like mirror backup and cloud storage, justifies for the premium cost.

My Book Live Duo comes with three year limited on-site warranty and comes in 4TB and 6TB models for ₹24,999 and ₹29,999 respectively.

Pros:

• Expandable storage option via USB
• RAID 1 and spanning
• Easy setup
• Swapable drives

Cons:

• No USB 3.0 or eSATA