Today Best Buy had the Western Digital MyBook World Edition II hard drive for $329.99. That’s my breaking point. I bought one. I haven’t set it up yet. I’ll probably use it as a pair of 500GB RAID 1 (mirrored) drives.
27 June 2007 update: This kit has some serious problems.
- The ability to share files over the internet is based on a service, which means if that company (MioNet) goes away or drops support for my device, I’m out of luck. No, thanks.
- The MioNet software doesn’t recognize the drive, although I can browse it on the network with Explorer. I even mapped it to a drive letter.
- The MioNet software won’t accept a password with any special symbols in it. the only chars allowed are alpha and numeric. This bothers me.
- The delivered backup software (EMC2’s Retrospect Express HD) reports that there is no space on device, even when I tried repeatedly to backup a directory with just 118KB of files in it. Geez.
- The best speed I got to this thing (up or down) was 1.9MB/sec. That’s not fast enough. I have a 1GB drive to backup daily. Even if I’m just moving deltas, it’ll be slooooow. But that’s moot if I can’t backup to this drive because of errors from Retrospect.
- I’d like to have a swap-out drive on-hand. I couldn’t find this on WD’s web site. Nice. Perhaps I have to call Support to order one. No, thanks.
- The fan runs constantly, though I have only been actively accessing the drive occasionally.
The good news: Setting it up as RAID 1 (mirroring) was easy.
This drive is going back to Best Buy. I’m going to get a Western Digital MyBook Premium (FireWire400/USB2.0) 500GB drive instead, from Amazon.com, for about $175 with free shipping and no sales tax.