Western Digital MyBook Live High Performance Gigabit NAS Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,111 words · ~5 min read
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This is the My Book Live and it is a member of Western Digital's Live series
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of products. So Live, as far as I can tell, has to do with networking. So this
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is a home network drive that is a NAS and this particular one is a one TBTE
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drive. So that means up to 120 HD videos
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and there's some kind of asterisk there. Uh
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250,000 MP3s or 200,000 photos. Gigabit
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Ethernet connects to your home network. And this is the cool thing about this guy. Look at that. up to 100 megabytes
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per second performance. Now, there's all kinds of mainstream NAS available on the
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market these days, but the reality of it is in my experience testing them. They
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can be gigabit or 1000 or 10 Gbit. I
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don't care what connectivity they have on the back. The processor inside the
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NAS enclosure just isn't fast enough to
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deliver the kind of thoroughut that the hard drive inside is capable of. So,
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what Western Digital's done with this product is they've taken the bottleneck
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out of the processor inside the box and
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they're giving you almost the full performance of that drive over your
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network. So, that means that when you're pulling files off of this drive, we
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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
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going to perform almost the same as an internal drive in your system. Pretty
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cool, huh? So, you can centralize all of your storage. That goes for pretty much
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any NAS. It comes with Western Digital software to back up your computers,
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including uh Apple Time Machine compatibility. You can access your files
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anywhere, including viewing stored photos with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod
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touch. And you can also stream media throughout your home, including to the
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WDTV Live. And I'll actually be doing a video shortly about that particular
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topic on my NCIX tech tips channel. It's
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compatible with pretty much everything under the sun. XP Vista Windows 7OS
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Leopard and Snow Leopard. It has some
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contents inside. And this is cool. I You know what? I know everyone but me has
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probably seen this already, but I just got a smartphone. So, I'm going to go
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ahead and uh check this out. So, hold on. Give me a minute. There we go. So,
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I'm going to go ahead and look at that.
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There we go. It turns green. And then it pulls up a web page and I can read all
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about the MyBook Live. So cool. So, uh, yeah, I think that's a neat feature that
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the box comes with the QR code on it.
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Like I said, I just got a smartphone. Go
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easy on me. You know, I'm behind in the
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times. So, let's see all the stuff that comes with this little guy. We got the
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drive, we got the cable, we got the box. Don't look at the box. Who cares about
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the box? All right. Then we got uh you
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know what? Here, let's look at the accessories first. We got a pretty pretty cool looking gigabit Ethernet
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cable with like shiny rims on the side.
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So, yeah, looks like a nice high quality cable. Then we have a power adapter. So,
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this particular power adapter is 0.5 amps max at 12 volts. So, you can go
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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
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going to walk you through all the configuration steps. has the WD
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Smartware for Windows, free remote access service, setup wizard. Don't
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throw this away unless you download the latest off the WD site, which I'm not
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sure if they have. And I believe that CD even prompts you to download the latest
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ones, although I could be wrong about that. Here's your quick start guide,
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which is fairly straightforward. Plug in, put in CD, follow the steps. Yeah,
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that easy. All right. Next, we have technical support and limited warranty
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guide. It's all black and white text. Very boring. Not going to look too
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closely at that. And then finally, we have the MyBook Live
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itself. So, inside is a 1 TB hard drive.
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And outside is a pretty slick looking little enclosure. So, we have an activity LED right here. Very, very
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small, but that ensures that it's not going to be intrusive. We have a nice
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little shiny WD logo right there on the bottom. We have some non-slippy rubber
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feet. And we also have, if I can get the right angle and get you guys to be able
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to see, we have ventilation holes. So you can actually see right through
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there. This whole unit is simply cooled by convection. So it means that the warm
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hard drive inside, and that is warm. It doesn't get hot because of all the air
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flow going through it. The warm hard drive inside heats up the air around it,
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which causes the warm air naturally to rise out the top where we also have
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ventilation holes. And then it's going to pull in new fresh air from the bottom
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where you can see we've actually got a gap under the drive when the rubber feet
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are on the table. So that's where the air flow is going to come from. Very
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simple but very very effective. On the back we have a Kensington lock just in
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case you have this on display in a store for example and you don't want somebody
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to steal it. We have DC power in as well as our gigabit Ethernet connectivity.
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You've got a hard reset switch here as well as a label of my book live. Now, if
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I can figure this out, I'd love to be able to show you guys how to
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uh I think there's a way to actually
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open it. I can't remember how. Anyway, that was my unboxing and first look at
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the WD MyBook Live. I have already actually done some testing on this drive
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and it is fast. That's why I was so excited about this. I had more than one,
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so I unboxed one on my own before I unboxed one with all of you. Don't
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forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips and thank you for watching.