WD My Book World Edition II 4Tb

[sranger]

Hello,

First, let me say this is a great site. I did a lot of research here before I made my purchase.

I purchased a WD My Book World Edition II 4Tb NAS from Amazon ( $488.00 ) and installed it yesterday. It is not the fastest NAS, but seemed to be a reasonable compromise between speed and cost. I tested some file transfer speeds and it seems to more or less match the speeds listed in the NAS charts on this site. I am using an 8 port D-Link DGS-2208 GigaBit switch. I have a Macbook Pro and a Mac Mini ( used as media computer ) I have the 9000 Jumbo frames enabled on both macs. I have two other XP computers and they worked correctly with the new NAS as well.

My old NAS system was a pair of 320Gb Iomega USB drives attached to my USR 8200 VPN router ( Yea I still love the old gal ) so even though the WD NAS it is not up to the speed of the more expensive units it was a significant boost in transfer speed from my old system. I also needed to store files larger than what FAT32 can handle ( FAT & FAT32 are the only options in the old USR 8200 ) I am running it as a RAID 1 and will get a 2Tb USB drive to backup the WD NAS.

I was happy to see that there was a new firmware available that adds Apple Time Machine compatibility. I chose the auto firmware update in the WEB interface and it worked without a hitch. The two macs and Time Machine worked flawlessly with the WD. The new Firmware also allows for unattended downloads as well. No scheduled backups yet, but at least it added a few options.

I have a medium size mp3 music library and I put it on the NAS and enabled the iTune media severs and I could see it on the Macbook and Mini immediately. I was disappointed in that it did not seem to understand my m3u playlists I have in the shared music directory. The nNAS uses the Twonky media server 5.1 and after looking at their site, it may be a problem with this version of the server.

I anyone knows of a fix for the playlist, please let me know....

Anyway, I wanted to share my experience say thank for a great site...

 

[ascender]

Hi, Just reading your post and am very interested as I'm trying to sort out my home library. Sorry if you saw the reply and were hoping for a fix.

Jut wondering if, with the iTunes server installed, you can now stream music and video to other Macs? I have an Apple TV, but the library is currently held on a Drobo connected to my iMac which means the Mac has to be on for the ATV to see the library. If I could find a NAS which had a built-in iTunes library, I wouldn't have to keep the Mac on and in the past I've been very pleased with WD My Books.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[sranger]

It does stream the music, the problem is that you can only see it as a share on iTunes and all of the music shows up as one big list and you can't create a play lists from that shared library.

iTunes stubbornly does not want to let you use a network drive as a shared library, but it is possible to set iTunes up to use a networked drive, but it is a bit of a pain to configure.

I have the Mac Mini as my media computer. As for video, I just play the movies I have in my library with Quicktime from the NAS. It seems to work fine.

As a test for you, I aded a movie to my iTunes library ( without copying it to the local drive ) and as long as I keep the network share open it shows up in FrontRow as an iTunes movie, so I suspect it will work with Apply TV as well. However, since I don't have Apple TV, so I don't know for sure if it will work.

The unit use the Twonky media server, you can read more about it here:

http://www.twonkyvision.de/

 

[ascender]

Thanks for the info, I'll have a look at that tomorrow.

Cheers!