This is the My Book Live and it is a member of Western Digital's Live series
of products. So Live, as far as I can tell, has to do with networking. So this
is a home network drive that is a NAS and this particular one is a one TBTE
drive. So that means up to 120 HD videos
and there's some kind of asterisk there. Uh
250,000 MP3s or 200,000 photos. Gigabit
Ethernet connects to your home network. And this is the cool thing about this guy. Look at that. up to 100 megabytes
per second performance. Now, there's all kinds of mainstream NAS available on the
market these days, but the reality of it is in my experience testing them. They
can be gigabit or 1000 or 10 Gbit. I
don't care what connectivity they have on the back. The processor inside the
NAS enclosure just isn't fast enough to
deliver the kind of thoroughut that the hard drive inside is capable of. So,
what Western Digital's done with this product is they've taken the bottleneck
out of the processor inside the box and
they're giving you almost the full performance of that drive over your
network. So, that means that when you're pulling files off of this drive, we
don't need to see this cuz we're going to open the box. When you're fulling pulling files off of this drive, it's
going to perform almost the same as an internal drive in your system. Pretty
cool, huh? So, you can centralize all of your storage. That goes for pretty much
any NAS. It comes with Western Digital software to back up your computers,
including uh Apple Time Machine compatibility. You can access your files
anywhere, including viewing stored photos with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod
touch. And you can also stream media throughout your home, including to the
WDTV Live. And I'll actually be doing a video shortly about that particular
topic on my NCIX tech tips channel. It's
compatible with pretty much everything under the sun. XP Vista Windows 7OS
Leopard and Snow Leopard. It has some
contents inside. And this is cool. I You know what? I know everyone but me has
probably seen this already, but I just got a smartphone. So, I'm going to go
ahead and uh check this out. So, hold on. Give me a minute. There we go. So,
I'm going to go ahead and look at that.
There we go. It turns green. And then it pulls up a web page and I can read all
about the MyBook Live. So cool. So, uh, yeah, I think that's a neat feature that
the box comes with the QR code on it.
Like I said, I just got a smartphone. Go
easy on me. You know, I'm behind in the
times. So, let's see all the stuff that comes with this little guy. We got the
drive, we got the cable, we got the box. Don't look at the box. Who cares about
the box? All right. Then we got uh you
know what? Here, let's look at the accessories first. We got a pretty pretty cool looking gigabit Ethernet
cable with like shiny rims on the side.
So, yeah, looks like a nice high quality cable. Then we have a power adapter. So,
this particular power adapter is 0.5 amps max at 12 volts. So, you can go
ahead and assume this guy is not going to pull a whole lot of power from your wall. Here's the software CD, which is
going to walk you through all the configuration steps. has the WD
Smartware for Windows, free remote access service, setup wizard. Don't
throw this away unless you download the latest off the WD site, which I'm not
sure if they have. And I believe that CD even prompts you to download the latest
ones, although I could be wrong about that. Here's your quick start guide,
which is fairly straightforward. Plug in, put in CD, follow the steps. Yeah,
that easy. All right. Next, we have technical support and limited warranty
guide. It's all black and white text. Very boring. Not going to look too
closely at that. And then finally, we have the MyBook Live
itself. So, inside is a 1 TB hard drive.
And outside is a pretty slick looking little enclosure. So, we have an activity LED right here. Very, very
small, but that ensures that it's not going to be intrusive. We have a nice
little shiny WD logo right there on the bottom. We have some non-slippy rubber
feet. And we also have, if I can get the right angle and get you guys to be able
to see, we have ventilation holes. So you can actually see right through
there. This whole unit is simply cooled by convection. So it means that the warm
hard drive inside, and that is warm. It doesn't get hot because of all the air
flow going through it. The warm hard drive inside heats up the air around it,
which causes the warm air naturally to rise out the top where we also have
ventilation holes. And then it's going to pull in new fresh air from the bottom
where you can see we've actually got a gap under the drive when the rubber feet
are on the table. So that's where the air flow is going to come from. Very
simple but very very effective. On the back we have a Kensington lock just in
case you have this on display in a store for example and you don't want somebody
to steal it. We have DC power in as well as our gigabit Ethernet connectivity.
You've got a hard reset switch here as well as a label of my book live. Now, if
I can figure this out, I'd love to be able to show you guys how to
uh I think there's a way to actually
open it. I can't remember how. Anyway, that was my unboxing and first look at
the WD MyBook Live. I have already actually done some testing on this drive
and it is fast. That's why I was so excited about this. I had more than one,
so I unboxed one on my own before I unboxed one with all of you. Don't
forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips and thank you for watching.