WD My Book World Edition

[Unregistered]

I've had a 1TB WD My Book World Edition and it is really annoying!
It only operates through a network and it is unbelievably SLOW.

I just thought of taking it apart, removing the hard drive and connecting it to a normal enclosure.

Do you have any reason to think that this would not work?
Does anyone know what type of drive is in there?

Thanks!

- Michael

 

[thiggins]

As noted in the review, the product is slow.

I would imagine it has a 1 TB WD drive in there. You will need to reformat it to use on a Windows system.

 

[Unregistered]

WD 1TB world

what do you mean reformat it? I currently use it w/ windows. why the reformat?
- Michael

 

[thiggins]

Because the disk is probably formatted with EXT or another Linux format, since that is the OS used in the product.

Windows uses SMB/CIFS as a network filesystem to read/write data to the NAS. But internally, the drive itself is formatted to match the OS.

Since you want to attach the drive directly to a Windows system, you need to format the drive to use a Windows drive format (FAT32, NTFS).

 

[Unregistered]

WD 1TB world

Can I do that after I have attached it to the Windows computer already?

 

[thiggins]

If you already have it attached and can read the data on the drive, you don't have to do anything. What is Windows saying the drive Filesystem is? (Found under drive Properties)

 

[Unregistered]

WD 1TB world

Well,
It is currently connected on the network as they sell it. I checked it, and it says that it is NTFS. I guess it should work properly if I were to connect it through a USB connection (?)

You wouldn't happen to know if it is IDE or SATA? (i.e. which enclosure should I buy?) How could I tell when I open the WD enclosure?

 

[thiggins]

You wouldn't happen to know if it is IDE or SATA? (i.e. which enclosure should I buy?)

If you read the review, you would know.

The mapped drive format doesn't mean anything. I'm pretty sure you will need to reformat it to attach it directly to your system.

 

[Unregistered]

WD 1TB world

Got it!

I appreciate your help.

- Michael

 

[claykin]

Tim, if the Worldbook drives are formatted NTFS, that could partially explain the poor performance. It really doesn't make sense why these drives would be formatted NTFS. Maybe the OP is incorrect?

Anyway, I don't think Windows will identify an EXT formatted drive unless you have a driver like EXT2 IFS installed.

 

[thiggins]

Tim, if the Worldbook drives are formatted NTFS, that could partially explain the poor performance. It really doesn't make sense why these drives would be formatted NTFS. Maybe the OP is incorrect?

I agree that the drive couldn't be NTFS formatted. I think he was just reporting what Windows (via SAMBA) was telling him for a mapped drive.

 

[Unregistered]

The MyBook World Edition is essentially a very small Linux computer. Inside of the enclosure is an Oxford Semiconductor OXE800SE circuit board powered by the ARM926 processor. This circuit board has an integrated Gigabit Ethernet controller, SATA controller, USB controllers, 32MB of SDRAM, and runs a heavily modified Linux OS. The drive is a SATA drive connected to the integrated SATA controller and is formatted in EXT3. You are able to access it through over the network because the Linux OS and accompanying software creates SMB/CIFS shares, which are accessible by Windows machines.

The poor performance on the WDMBWE is due to the ARM926 processor, which is limited in how much data it can handle. So, even though it has a Gigabit Ethernet controller and is marketed as such, the processor is limited to about 3-5MBps. You will never be able to transfer anything faster than that because of this bottleneck in the processor.

Although there is a lot out there about "unlocking" your WDMBWE and using it as a Linux machine, I bought this drive to be an easily accessible storage solution on my home network. I've been greatly disappointed. I just bought an Antec MX-1 enclosure. This enclosure supports SATA drives up to 1TB. If you buy an enclosure to put your drive into, make sure it can handle a drive at least that big. This enclosure has a USB 2.0 port and an eSATA port and is actively cooled. I haven't ripped apart my MyBook yet, so I don't know if it will work. If you try this, just remember once you do and you connect it directly to your Windows machine, you'll have to format the drive in either FAT32 or NTFS to use it on your Windows machine. So if you have anything on the drive right now, I'd suggest you transfer everything off of it before you try this (which, sad to say, will probably take forever if you have a lot on there).

Good luck!

 

[KungFu Panda]

The enclosure on my MBW drive died, the drive itself is fine. Can i install Linux in a computer and attach the drive and get the data out, or would i need something else. Maybe some kind of driver in order to view the contents on Windows or a MAC.

Thanks

 

[SnapperTrx]

Horrible drive

This drive seemed like a good idea at the time, but the enclosure failed within the first year of having it, and there is no other way to get data off of it if it fails, beyond the ethernet port. When we called Western Digital with the issue, they said it was still under warranty and they would be glad to send us another one. However, they were not going to take out the perfectly good drive and put it in a new enclosure, they were going to replace the entire device and wipe the drive, unless we wanted to pay to have the data recovered. I would avoid this drive until they put some type of useable USB interface into it. The one it has can only be used for attaching more usb drives (how does that make sense?!?!?!).

 

[WinHill]

My Book World writes a large file at over 20 MB/s.

The poor performance on the WDMBWE is due to the ARM926 processor, which is limited in how much data it can handle. So, even though it has a Gigabit Ethernet controller and is marketed as such, the processor is limited to about 3-5MBps. You will never be able to transfer anything faster than that because of this bottleneck in the processor.

Thanks for the interesting info.

Here are my observations. First, with an 100 Mbps switch (LinkSys classic EZXS55W), it took me 4.5 hours to create a 117GB backup file on a My Book World. This is about 7MB/s, or 58 Mbps, slightly better than the above comments. This is 58% of the 100base-T theoretical speed limit.

But I suspected the switch was the bottleneck, so I replaced it with a new 1000 Mbps gigabit switch (Cisco Linksys SD2005). Now a second 117GB backup took only 1.5 hours, which is 3x faster, or about 21MB/s, which is about 170 Mbps. Clearly 170Mbps is way too fast for a 100base-T switch or hub, and that was the problem, not the WD My Book.

We can conclude that the My Book World must NOT be so severely limited as stated.

(The backup was with Acronis, running under Windows 7, on a ASUS P6T mobo with an Intel i7 processor and 3G of ram.)

 

[Unregistered]

How to recover data from worldbook drives?

My WD World Edition (enclosure) died and of course I thought with a RAIDED setup, my data was safe. I pulled the drives out. Can anyone suggest the simplest and most economical way to recover the data? I ordered a NetGear pro duo NAS to replace the POS WD unit.

 

[Tom]

Harvesting drives from a WD MBW II

My WD MBW ii drive failed as well after just 2 years of use. The box was behaving erratically for a few months (freeze ups, going offline) and being paranoid with my data, my important files were replicated elsewhere. The drive finally died for good in early Jan/2010. Based upon info on the net, I decided I would remove the two 500GB [Caviar blue] drives (drives A and B) and see whether they were useable. Since the drives were expected to be formatted for use with Linux, I tried a Fedora distribution to view the drive contents. I moved each drive to a Windows PC and booted up Fedora. Drive B was toast! I could not access the drive without the entire PC locking up! Drive A worked fine and Fedora revealed 4, Software Raid partitions. Since I wasn't particularly interested in the data stored on the drive, I proceeded to delete the partitions and run a simple Linux install on the drive to evaluate the drive's useability. Everything worked fine. Eventually, I decided to add the drive to a Windows PC as a second internal SATA drive. Using Windows XP SP3 diskmgmt, I deleted the Linux partitions and reformatted the drive into NTFS partitions. The drive is currently working fine in its new job.
As for the WD MBW, it appears the failed drive B was the cause of the unit's failure. Although it's not uncommon for drives to fail in the first 2 years, the fact that the unit experienced problems before the end of year 2 (and, of course, out of warranty) and the general annoying problems during the 2 years with the mionet software and the unit in general was extremely disappointing.

 

[curryp]

Wb 2

My WD MBW ii drive failed as well after just 2 years of use. The box was behaving erratically for a few months (freeze ups, going offline) and being paranoid with my data, my important files were replicated elsewhere. The drive finally died for good in early Jan/2010. Based upon info on the net, I decided I would remove the two 500GB [Caviar blue] drives (drives A and B) and see whether they were useable. Since the drives were expected to be formatted for use with Linux, I tried a Fedora distribution to view the drive contents. I moved each drive to a Windows PC and booted up Fedora. Drive B was toast! I could not access the drive without the entire PC locking up! Drive A worked fine and Fedora revealed 4, Software Raid partitions. Since I wasn't particularly interested in the data stored on the drive, I proceeded to delete the partitions and run a simple Linux install on the drive to evaluate the drive's useability. Everything worked fine. Eventually, I decided to add the drive to a Windows PC as a second internal SATA drive. Using Windows XP SP3 diskmgmt, I deleted the Linux partitions and reformatted the drive into NTFS partitions. The drive is currently working fine in its new job.
As for the WD MBW, it appears the failed drive B was the cause of the unit's failure. Although it's not uncommon for drives to fail in the first 2 years, the fact that the unit experienced problems before the end of year 2 (and, of course, out of warranty) and the general annoying problems during the 2 years with the mionet software and the unit in general was extremely disappointing.

How did you get Linux to see the partitions? i'm pretty new to it and running Ubuntu 9.1

 

[Unregistered]

How did you get Linux to see the partitions? i'm pretty new to it and running Ubuntu 9.1

I've found mounting/unmounting for data recovery a huge hassle with Ubuntu so I'd rather suggest using a Knoppix Live CD. (you barely need Linux skills).
It supports R/W access to NTFS so all you have to do is mount the source and target partitions and voilà, you're ready to backup your stuff.

 

[Unregistered]

My BookWorld unit disappeared from my network a few days ago. I've removed the drive (single TB drive) and connected it to a Windows PC. It sees the partitions as "Unknown." I found a driver for Linux filesystems under Windows, assuming the drive was Linux, or at least Linux-ish, still "Unknown."

Anybody ever been able to just hook one of these up and read it? I have to get to some stuff on it. This drive was the backup to another failed system.