Western Digital My Book
My Book is a series of external hard drives produced by Western Digital. There are currently nine series of My Book drives; Essential Edition, Home Edition, Office Edition, Mirror Edition, Studio Edition, Premium Edition, Elite Edition, Pro Edition, AV Dvr "Live Edition", and the World Edition.
My Book drives are designed to look like a standard black hardback book, with the exception of the Pro/Studio series, which are silver, and the World series, which are white. Other than the book-like appearance of the drive's case, My Book drives originally featured vent holes on the top of the drives which spelled out a message in Morse code.
Essential Edition
In addition to the book-like design, the My Book Essential Edition drives have an Intelligent Power Management feature that stops the drive platters after ten minutes of inactivity, rather than the usual expedient of slowing them down. The unit also turns on and off with the computer it is attached to.Essential Edition My Book drives are almost entirely black, with the exception of a single blue light, used to indicate power and activity, or a circular green light that is located on the front of the drive. The older model has a white light.
"Essential Edition" drives used USB 2.0 for connectivity are available in capacities of 80 GB, 160 GB, 250 GB, 320 GB, 400 GB, 500 GB and 750 GB.
Premium Edition
Premium Edition drives are similar to the Essential Edition model but also include FireWire 400 ports, an integrated visual capacity gauge and Western Digital backup software.Premium Edition My Book drives have the same black case as Essential Edition drives; however, the light surrounding the power button is blue. Also, inside the standard blue light is another blue ring light that contains eight individual segments which indicate the remaining space on the drive. This edition is available with storage capacities of 160 GB, 250 GB, 320 GB, 400 GB, and 750 GB.
Pro Edition
The Pro Edition My Books contain all of the features of the Premium Edition ones, but with added FireWire 800 connectivity for fast data transfer. In addition, the Pro Edition My Books replace the Western Digital backup software found on the Premium Editions with EMC Retrospect Express backup and recovery software.Pro Edition My Book drives have the same basic case design as Premium Edition drives; however, the case is silver rather than black. In addition, it includes a circular blue capacity gauge LED divided into six segments and an outer ring that represents drive activity.
The "Pro Edition MyBook" is marketed as a RAID solution that can be used as a backup device.
Pro Edition II
This edition was available with storage capacities of 500 GB, 640 GB, 1 TB, 1.5 TB, and 2 TB.Premium Edition II
This edition is black and was available with storage capacities of 500 GB, 640 GB, 1 TB, 1.5 TB, and 2 TB.World Edition
The World Edition My Books function as Network-attached storage, by way of an Ethernet interface. They also feature an extra USB host port to allow an additional USB drive to be daisychained. Data on first generation My Book World is accessed as CIFS/SMB shared folders. The second generation expands the access choices to include NFS, FTP, an iTunes server, and a Twonky media server.In addition, the World Edition uses WD Anywhere Access to gain remote access to the drive via the Internet.
It has the same basic case design as the Premium Edition drives, including the capacity gauge, except the color of the World Edition is white. It has the same Morse code ventilation as the other editions.
Network speed
Although MyBook Ethernet-capable disks come with a Gigabit Ethernet interface, the network speed is significantly slower. Especially for older "blue rings" models, where it varies between 3–6 MByte/s, with an average of 4.5 MByte/s. The newer "white lights" MyBook World Edition 1 TB and 2 TB storage capacity models, WDH1NC and WDH2NC, have drive speeds comparable to USB, at about 10 MB/s write and 25 MB/s read.The "white lights" WDH1NC is Jumbo Frames capable and can achieve ~36 MByte/s reading and ~18 MByte/s writing speed over Gigabit Ethernet.
Internals
This drive runs BusyBox on Linux on an Oxford Semiconductor 0XE800 ARM chip which has the ARM926EJ-S core. In addition it uses a VIA Cicada Simpliphy vt6122 Gigabit Ethernet chipset, and a Hynix 32 Mbit DDR Synchronous DRAM chip. The webserver is the mini_http server, although older "bluerings" use Lighttpd. The drives of the World Edition are xfs or ext3 formatted, which means that the drive can be mounted as a standard drive from within Linux if removed from the casing and installed in a normal PC.With both sets of commands a utility such as Gparted can be used to determine which paths are relevant for a given setup.
Extending capabilities
The device can be 'unlocked' and accessed via SSH terminal, meaning that the WD MioNet java-based software can be disabled so the device can be run with an unrestricted Linux OS, at the cost of voiding the warranty. The unlocking makes it possible to install other software on MyBook. For example, the user can run a different web server or an ftp server on it, use NFS for mounting shared directories natively from Unix, or install a bitTorrent client such as rTorrent.Premium ES Edition
My Book Premium ES Edition drives are nearly identical to their Premium Edition counterparts, the only difference being that the ES line features a single eSATA connection instead of the dual FireWire 400 ports present on the Premium Edition, allowing computers with available eSATA ports to transfer data at speeds of up to 3 Gbit/s. This edition is available in 320 GB and 500 GB capacities.Mirror Edition
This edition was available with storage capacities of 1 TB and 2 TB.for Mac
This edition was available with storage capacities of 2 TB, 3 TB, 4 TB, 6 TB and 8 TB.Essential
This edition was available with storage capacities of 500 GB, 640 GB, 1 TB, 1.5 TB, and 2 TB.Studio
The MyBook Studio Edition comes with quad interface: USB 2.0 / FireWire 400 / FireWire 800 and eSATA. It is marketed for use with Mac OS X. This edition is available with storage capacities of 1 TB, 1.5 TB and 2 TB.The current edition has two FireWire 800 ports and one USB 2.0 mini port. It comes pre-formatted as Mac OS X HFS+.
All current My Book Studio LX drives include a 5400RPM Hitachi branded Raptor hard drive.
The 'MyBook Studio Edition II' contains two drives and is designed to be used as a RAID system for increased performance. This edition is available with storage capacities of 1 TB, 2 TB, 4 TB and 6 TB.
The two drives can be replaced by the user.
The LED gauge has a design fault on these disks. Several users reported that some of the LEDs were burning out after 3 to 4 months of normal usage.
Live
In 2011, Western Digital released the My Book Live Edition NAS. They range in storage capacity from 1 to 3 TB. My Book Live uses Applied Micro APM82181 processor working at 800 MHz and has 256 MB of RAM. Broadcom BCM54610 ethernet is able to support 10/100/1000 Mbit/s connectivity. Contrary to previous versions, Live has no USB ports. Instead of a Linux-Kernel & Busybox found in previous versions, Live uses a full-featured Debian GNU/Linux.Live Duo
My Book Live Duo was released in January 2012. It features two drives that can be configured in a RAID array; in that case, all data is automatically mirrored and can be recovered if one of the drives fail. It sports a similar design to the previous My Book Live, but unlike that one this product has a top cover that allows for easily servicing and replacing the drives. It also has one Gigabit Ethernet and one USB connection.AV DVR Expander
The My Book AV DVR Expander is intended to increase the disk capacity of consumer DVRs or compatible camcorders. It can also be used connected to a computer, if necessary. The Expander is available with a storage capacity of 1 TB.The DVR Expander was originally designed specifically for the TiVo series 3 and onwards and, at that time, the only connectivity was an eSATA port. Recent versions come with a USB 2.0 connection, as well, and are compatible with Direct TV, Dish TV, and the Pace, Time Warner and Scientific Atlanta brands of DVR.
"My Cloud"
In 2013, My Cloud NAS has been released by Western Digital. My Cloud uses a Mindspeed Comcerto 2000 dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 Communication Processor running at 650 MHz. The Gigabit Ethernet port is a Broadcom BCM54612E Gigabit Ethernet Transceiver. Other components include 256 MB of Samsung K4B2G1646E DDR3 RAM and 512 KB of Winbound 25X40CL flash. The drive is a WD Red 2 TB.My Cloud relies on air convection for cooling, not a fan.