The Western Digital My Book Live Personal Cloud Storage, available in 1TB, 2TB and 3TB sizes, is one of the “cheap NAS” devices that are currently available that will probably do the job for you.
Not everyone can afford or even wants to spend the money on a “real” home NAS like the ReadyNAS Ultra 2, and that’s OK.
If you just need the equivalent of an external USB hard drive that is available to multiple computers and other devices, both PC and Mac (The WD My Book is Apple Time Machine compatible) then this could be for you.
The key consideration is that a cheap home NAS like this should not be the ONLY copy of any data that you have unless you have a scheduled backup being performed as frequently as the data changes, hopefully daily.
The problem with a home NAS like this is that it is a single hard drive, no RAID protection against a failed disk.
Fortunately, the hard drives included in these Western Digital My Book network storage devices are decent quality drives in the first place and even spin at 7200rpm, so it’s not the bottom of the line drive. But that does NOT mean that it cannot fail and even fail early in life.
How Do Users Review The Western Digital My Book Live
There are lots of reviews on Amazon.com for this home network attached storage unit. And, interestingly enough, are pretty much equally split between 1 star and 5 star.
What this means is that one size does not fit all; not speaking of drive size.
Some buyer of a unit like this know absolutely nothing about computers or networking and that is what the product is targeted for. Yet some that have certain internet service providers may have some difficulty setting it up because of the ISP’s desire to “help” with domain name searches that fail.
More experienced buyers of this product might feel a little bit restricted in what they are able to do with it.
So while you will never find a cheap home NAS as our top recommendation, we nonetheless recognize the legitimate market for a product like this and admire consumers who at least are attracted to one of the top names in storage, in this case, Western Digital.
A Word On Price
Keep in mind that those who feel this device is overpriced are probably comparing it to other brands that have stuck a cheap, 5400rpm hard drive in a box and are selling it to very price conscious buyers who may end up extremely disappointed when that “cheap, cheap NAS” goes belly up with their data.
How Do You Backup The Western Digital My Book NAS
Online Backup is a great way to protect yourself against data loss both from hard drive failure but also from geographic (location) disasters like flood, tornado, fire and theft.
The thing is, though, many if not most online backup services do NOT support network drives or shares. (Find out which ones do support network drives here)
So make sure that, unless your WD My Book is FOR backup (and even then you might do well to have OFF-SITE backup) get it onto a scheduled online backup software that will support it.
If you are in the market for a quality (yet cheap) home NAS then give the Western Digital My Book Live Personal Cloud Storage a look.