Western Digital My Book Live Personal Storage 3TB Network Attached Storage Drive: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories

Available Warranties for This Item

Frequently Bought Together

Technical Details

Storage and backup for all the PC and Mac computers on your network
View photos and files with apps for your iPad and smartphone
Securely access media and files remotely over the Internet
Stream videos, music, and photos to your entertainment centre
Built-in 800 MHz CPU for maximum performance and speed

› See more technical details

Product details

Product Dimensions: 30.4 x 22.7 x 37.2 cm ; 1.1 Kg
Boxed-product Weight: 1.5 Kg
Item model number: WDBACG0030HCH-EESN
ASIN: B004DTXFDS
Date first available at Amazon.co.uk: 18 Mar 2011

Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,529 in Computers & Accessories (See Top 100 in Computers & Accessories)
- #12 in Computers & Accessories > External Devices & Data Storage > Network Attached Storage

Would you like to give feedback on images?

Manufacturer's Description

Centralise the scattered data from CDs, DVDs, and USB sticks to one location for the whole family to access from any computer.

My Book Live - Centralise Your Media. Simplify Your Life

Simplify your digital life by consolidating your movies, music, photos, and files in one location for everyone on your wired or wireless network to share. Back up all your PC and Mac computers to one safe place, access files securely over the internet, stream media to your entertainment centre, and show off all your photos with your iPhone.

Simplify Your Digital Life

Why have your media and important files scattered across multiple machines and storage mediums? Reduce the clutter of all those USB sticks, CDs, and DVDs by storing and backing up your entire family's movies, music, photos, and important files to one safe place.

Backup the files on all your computers, access and share files inside and outside your home, and stream media.

WD 2go: The Pathway to Your Personal Cloud

What is a Personal Cloud?

A personal cloud is your content secure at home and under your control. Unlike public clouds, a personal cloud allows you to keep all your content in one safe place on your home network. Share files, stream media, and access your content anywhere. No monthly fees. No mysterious location of your data. Keep your media and files safe at home and always with you.

WD 2go web access provides fee-free remote access to your My Book Live personal cloud storage.

Get to Your Content from Anywhere with WD 2go Web Access

If you can access the Internet from a computer, you can securely access your media and files anywhere in the world. WD 2go web access provides fee-free remote access to your My Book Live personal cloud storage. Once you log in, WD 2go mounts My Book Live to your computer like a local drive and your remote folders are available on your Mac or PC. Seamlessly open, save as, and attach files to emails from this virtual drive.

Free your photos from your computer, view them anywhere, for free.

Show Off Your Photos with Your iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, or Android Smartphone

Get quick access to all the photos stored on your My Book Live, My Book World Edition, or WD ShareSpace network drive using your iPad, iPhone, iPhone, iPod touch, or Android smartphone. Your photos are private, safe and secure on your home network drive. No need to spend time and money on an online photo service.

Your Smartphone Just Become Brilliant

Show off your entire photo collection, up to 285,000 photos, without taking up tons of space on your smartphone. Download the free app from the Android Market or the Apple iTunes store and make your phone the centre of attention.

WD Photos is compatible with leading Apple mobile devices and the most popular Android smartphones including, but not limited to, the DROID by Motorola, DROID Incredible by HTC, Nexus One, and the HTC EVO 4G. Photos are automatically optimised for perfect viewing on your mobile device.

Turn Your iPad into the Ultimate Photo Album

Show off every detail of your favourite memories without compromise. When viewing your photos with your iPad, you have access to the highest available resolution - 1024 x 768. WD Photos allows for a large cache size on your iPad, so you can access more of your viewed photos even when you're offline. Display your photos vertically or view them horizontally and turn your iPad into the ultimate photo album.

Enjoy advanced search features & facebook photo posting. Click here to see a larger image.

All Your Photos at Your Fingertips

WD Photos offers a variety of features, including:

Instantly post photos to Facebook
Create a slideshow with transitions to create digital art
Access previously viewed photos even when you are offline
View your photos all at once or filter them by folder or album
Search by file name, folder name, or date using the built-in search options
E-mail a photo to friend, assign a photo to a contact, or add a photo to the Camera Roll

Storage and Backup for all Your Computers in Your Network

Share Your Media Collection on Your Network

With the My Book Live you can share any of its files with any of the computers on your home network. Just plug the drive into your router, and any PC or Mac on your wired or wireless network can access the data.

You don't need to be a network expet. The WD My Book Live is easy to set up and easy to find on your network.

Easy to Set Up, Easy to Find on Your Network

Set up is a snap. In just a few minutes, you're up and running. Mac, Windows 7, and Windows Vista® computers will automatically find your My Book Live drive in seconds. If you're running Windows XP, our simple discovery software makes it easy to set up the drive.

Leading-Edge Performance

Designed around the most recent advances in Ethernet chip technology, this product delivers read speeds up to 100 MBps. That's 4 times faster than most consumer network drives in this category today. Imagine what you could do with those speeds - stream music and movies to multiple PCs or compatible TVs, transfer large files in a flash. The possibilities are yours to explore.

Automatic Backup with WD SmartWare for Windows

Back up the data on all your home computers to a single, reliable place. Every time you save something, it's instantly backed up. You can even back up Windows computers wirelessly over your WiFi network. Restore lost, damaged or older files to their original location with a just a few clicks.

It's so easy, everyone in the house will use it, whether they're on a Mac or PC. And set up is a breeze, too.

Compatible with Apple Time Machine

Mac computer users can utilise all the features of Apple Time Machine backup software to protect their data. Back up all your Macs wirelessly to one location over your WiFi network.

Play Your Music on Any Computer in Your Home

The drive includes iTunes server support so you can centralise your music collection and stream to a Mac or PC.

Stream Digital Media Anywhere in Your Home

Watch your daughter's birthday party video or show off your holiday slideshow on your TV. The built-in media server streams music, photos and movies to any DLNA-certified multimedia device such as WD TV Live HD media player, Blu-ray Disc player, Xbox 360, or PlayStation 3. DLNA 1.5 & UPnP certified.

Ideal for

Centralising your digital media collection on your wired or wireless network
Sharing movies, music, and photos with all the computers on your network
Backing up data from all the PC and Mac computers in your home
Viewing your photo collection with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch
Streaming media to your Blu-ray Disc players, game consoles, media players, or other DNLA/UPnP devices on your home network

Backup Your Backup

You can automatically make a second copy, or safepoint, of your My Book Live on another My Book Live or NAS drive on your home network. Now you've got double-safe protection for all your media and ultimate peace of mind.

Product Description

Storage

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful

Fast and efficient NAS server but avoid WD software 3 Feb 2012

By David Nash

I decided to buy this unit in preference to storing all my stuff onto some nebulous cloud in the ether where I don't have control of it (yes I'm paranoid about this).
Firstly, once you've got it working properly the MyBookLive (MBL) is an excellent unit, but there are a few things you need to do after switching it on for the first time, to avoid the same problems I had like not being able to access the Users settings on the Home page after switch on.

1) Don't install the WD software, it's not really needed, and it's impossible to uninstall it (I had to use a restore point to get rid of it under Win 7 64 bit), and it may have caused the problems I had later.
2) Give the device a static IP address, it's easier.
2) Read the manual and update the device firmware to the latest version (02.10.09-124 at present) as soon as possible, and then reset it to the default factory settings (the firmware update will remain)
3) If you want to create a private share, first create a windows 7 user with the same credentials. This is the ONLY way I found that will allow access to the private share.
4) The Twonky server (which is excellent if you avoid .mkv files), can be accessed directly using the URL[...] where 192.168.1.100 is the IP address of the MBL.
5) If you read the forums you will take my advice and avoid trying to stream .mkv files to Xbox or PS3, use divx or mp4

I found the unit to be extremely fast and efficient, operating at 1000Gb/s through my VM superhub via ethernet. If you want to stream HD movies do it at 720p and a bit rate of around 10000 to 12000 Kb/s on a 54G WiFi connection, this works fine (for me at least!).
Contrary to some forum threads, my unit does spend a lot of time on standby, and I have not found a problem with the unit not entering standby when idle. It can be switched off via the web page - don't do this by pulling the plug!! If you do switch it off you will need to recycle the power to switch it on again.
Hopefully WD will iron out the bugs, some people have accessed the Linux OS in the device to get round some "issues", but I would NOT recommend this, as any warranty could be void by this action.

Comment |

Was this review helpful to you?

Yes

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

Simples 26 Mar 2012

By A. Wilson

Amazon Verified Purchase

Worked straight out of the box.
Plugged it into my router and tada all my computers can see it.

Great product.

Comment |

Was this review helpful to you?

Yes

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

Nice idea but it just doesn't work (Mac) 24 Feb 2012

By Michael J. Costabile

I decided to purchase this item to replace my Apple Time Capsule as I no longer needed the Wifi router capabilities of the Time Capsule. It was therefore to be used primarily for Time Machine backups.

Opening the box revealed the drive, power supply and a software disk. The disk was labelled indicating it was for Windows installation. I was installing on a Mac so I wondered where to find Mac drivers, however, when I put the disk in to my Mac, it did have an installation programme. This is where the problems started.
The programme identified the disk on my network without a problem.

I followed the instructions for installation - saying yes to installing the quick access icon, renaming the device and then setting up the user. Here I hit my next problem - I was given an error saying that there were network problems. I switched to the Utilities and ran a network test which reported no problem. I was left confused.

I updated the firmware to see if that resolved the problem - but it didn't. I did some searching around on the internet and found various messages to suggest that it was the firmware update itself that caused the problem. Interestingly, there were a number of comments that the error code reported had no explanation on the Western Digital website. A search on the site confirmed this. After reading a number of suggestions, I did a factory restore (quick version) and things were resolved in this area.

I then proceeded to my Macbook Pro and started a Time Machine backup. This appeared to initiate without problem. When retiring to bed, I closed the MBP down and started up a backup on my iMac. In the morning, I looked at the iMac and it reported that it was 6Gb into a backup, a full 8 hours after it had staretd. This surprised me and I calculated that it would take about 3 months to back up my iMac at that rate. I suspected network problems so looked for settings in the drive for network, and on my router, but could find nothing that would suggest a fix. I decided to check out my Macbook Pro and also looked at the My Book Live and realised that it actually contained 80Gb of data, combined backups from both my iMac and Macbook Pro. It seemed that what I was viewing was just the latest status - and indicated that the backup routine had been interrupted. I decided to restart the Macbook Pro Time Machine to see if it was running at a reasonable speed. It ran for 10 minutes, then lost connection and the My Book Live disappeared from my desktop.

I have a number of devices connected to my router and no indication that they suffer dropping network connections so am confused as to why the My Book Live should be dropping its network connection.

The final straw was when I came to run the drive interface software again - there was no quick launch icon on my task bar to access it, and it was not in the applications list, despite having asked if I wanted to install it. Further attempts to install it left me with a message saying it was already installed. I had to revert to running the software from the disk. I checked the Western Digital support site to see evidence of this problem and/or an updated version of the software - neither were present.

It was at this point that I decided to give up and return the device. I blame the software as the ultimate problem - Mac has a huge user base and some effort must be made to ensure that the device properly supports their operating systems. I have no idea what the cause of the network drops are, but they too, added to my disappointment in this device.

1 Comment |

Was this review helpful to you?

Yes

Customer Discussions