Western Digital My Book

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A My Book Essential Edition External Hard Drive with 1 TB capacity

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 and the World Edition.

My Book drives are designed to look like a standard black hardback book, with the exception of the Pro 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 feature vent holes on the top of the drives which spell out a message in Morse code.

Classic Editions

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 newer model has a white light.)

"Essential Edition" drives are available in 320GB, 400GB, 500GB, 640GB, 750GB, 1TB, 1.5TB, and 2TB.

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 8 individual segments which indicate the remaining space on the drive. This edition is available in 160GB, 250GB, 320GB, 400GB, and 750GB.

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 320GB and 500GB.

Premium Edition II

This edition is Black and is available in 500MB, 1TB, 1.5TB, and 2TB. It is also the largest physically.

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 (representing 17% of usage per segment) and an outer ring that represents drive activity.

The "Pro Edition MyBook" is marketed as a RAID solution that can be used a backup device.

Studio Edition

The 'MyBook Studio Edition' comes with quad interface: USB 2.0 / Firewire 400 / Firewire 800 and eSATA. It is marketed for use with Macintosh. This edition is available in 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB [1].

The new edition comes (at March 2010) with two Firewire 800 ports and one USB 2.0. It comes ready formatted for PPC Mac. To boot from this drive with an Intel Mac besides cloning the OS onto it after reformatting it for Intel (use GUID under Partition with Disk Utility) you will need to use the USB lead to get it to work using Alt (Option) key when you restart. Strange - considering it has Firewire 800. It boots via USB 2.0 quite quickly though. From a PPC Mac you must use Firewire if you want a boot drive so this drive may not work.

WD Smartware is provided on a sort of virtual CD for backup and locking files.

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 in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB [2].
The two drives can be replaced by the user[3], but the documentation states that "Only WD Caviar GP hard drive assemblies can be inserted into the My Book Studio Edition II or Mirror Edition enclosure."[4]

The LED gauge has a design issue on these disks. Several [weasel words] users reported that some of the LEDs were burning out after 3 to 4 months of normal usage.

World Edition

The World Edition My Books function as Network-attached storage (NAS), 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 (Blue Rings) My Book World is accessed as CIFS/SMB shared folders. The second generation (White Lights) 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 also 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 (200Mhz ARM CPU and 32 MByte RAM), where it varies between 3–6 MByte/s, with an average of 4.5 MByte/s.[5]. The newer "white lights" MyBook World Edition 1TB and 2TB models, WDH1NC and WDH2NC (oxnas810[6], 380 Mhz ARM CPU and 128 MByte RAM), compare to USB drive speed at about 10MB/s write and 25MB/s read.[7].

Using a performance-optimized copying software, such as FastCopy[8], enlarged TcpWindowSize on WindowsXP ("TCP tuning") and enlarged network MTU size ("Jumbo frame") enabled on both MyBook and Windows, a "white lights" WDH1NC achieves ~36 MByte/s reading and ~18 MByte/s writing speed for Samba/CIFS access over Gigabit Ethernet.

Internals

Controller board for My Book World Edition

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_httpd server, although thought to be Lighttpd. The drives of the World Edition are xfs 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.

The disk filesystems are also known to exist in a format created by linux multiple devices driver (Mdadm) which ultimately wraps an ext3 partition with some metadata that allows the inquiry of the position of the drive in a RAID set. Unfortunately, this makes mounting the drives outside of the enclosure a bit more complicated, it also requires a machine with a flavor of the Linux operating system. For example, the best way to mount the drives on a Linux flavored operating system after they have been removed from the enclosure is to use the following set of commands for mirrored RAID 1 disks. 

$ sudo modprobe md
$ sudo mknod /dev/md4 b 9 4
$ sudo apt-get install mdadm
$ sudo mdadm --assemble /dev/md4 /dev/sdb4
$ sudo mkdir /media/xyz
$ sudo mount /dev/md4 /media/xyz
$ sudo chmod -R 777 /media/xyz

Note that the above set of commands assume that your drives appear as /dev/sdb to linux. You can use a utility like gparted to determine which paths are relevant for your setup.

And alternately you can use this command set for mounting a multidisk spanning RAID 0 set in linux: 

$ sudo modprobe md
$ sudo mknod /dev/md4 b 9 4
$ sudo apt-get install mdadm
$ mdadm -Cv /dev/md4 -l0 -n2 -c64 /dev/sdb4 /dev/sdc4
$ sudo mkdir /media/xyz
$ sudo mount /dev/md4 /media/xyz
$ sudo chmod -R 777 /media/xyz

Note that the above set of commands assume that your drives appear as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb to linux. Again, you can use a utility like gparted to determine which paths are relevant for your setup.

Further details and support are available at the following My Worldbook wiki.

Extending capabilities

The device can be 'unlocked' and accessed via SSH terminal (newer versions of WDH1NC10000 do not need to be "unlocked": MBWE SSH Access), meaning that the WD MioNet java-based software can be disabled so the device can be run with an unrestricted Linux OS,[9] at the cost of voiding the warranty.[10] The unlocking makes it possible to install other software on MyBook (i.e. run a different webserver or an ftp server (such as vsftpd) on it, use NFS for mounting shared directories natively from Unix, or even install a bitTorrent client such as rTorrent,[11] etc.) Further information on unlocking the device and downloads you are going to need can be found here.

Edition II My Books

In addition to the regular My Book drives, Western Digital has also released special high-capacity "Edition II" versions of the Premium,[12] Pro,[13] and World[14] Edition My Books. In addition to the features present in the respective My Book edition, these drives feature two 500 GB RAID configured hard disks which can be selected by the end user as RAID 0 (Data striping), or RAID 1 (Data mirroring), depending on personal preference. If selected as RAID 0, the end user has 1Tb of available storage. Either way, if one of the internal drives of the Edition II My Books fails, it can be easily removed and replaced by the user without voiding the warranty. Western Digital uses this feature to their advantage, claiming that their drives needn't be returned for costly service in the case of a drive failure.[15]

New Editions

In Late 2007, Western Digital introduced a new line of My Book drives. These included the Essential Edition 2.0, Home Edition, Office Edition, and Studio Editions, and ranged in capacity from 320 GB to 2 TB. As some dealers offer the new edition My Book encased HD for a lower price than that of the plain HD it contains, customers have been known to purchase My Book drives, dismantle them, and use them in an internal bay in a PC or media device.[16] The Home Edition features an Oxford 934 chipset.

WD MyBook World Edition shipping at the beginning of 2010 ("white light", e.g. Model WD10000H1NC with 1TB) come with single 3.5" hard disk from the Western Digital Green Power Series (claiming 30% more energy efficiency for the box), ox810 chipset (ARM926EJ-S cpu) and 128 MBytes of RAM. SSH root access can be enabled through the regular Web configuration UI. The hard disk contains a 2 GB System partition of which only 100 MBytes are used by the OS, and a separate 256MB swap partition.

Morse code

Morse code on a My Book Pro Edition drive case

The Morse code message written into the drive case is made up of a selection of the words "personal", "reliable", "innovative", "simple", and "design".[17] The first occurrence of "innovative" on the My Book Pro and My Book World Edition features a misspelling and reads "innovateve".[18]

References

  1. ^ [1]
  2. ^ [2]
  3. ^ wdc.com: My Book Studio Edition II 1 TB Hard Drives
  4. ^ wdc.custhelp.com: How to dismantle a My Book Studio Edition II or Mirror Edition to replace a hard drive.
  5. ^ WD Support answer about Network Speed slowness
  6. ^ PLX Technology
  7. ^ [3]
  8. ^ FastCopy -- multi-threaded copy program for Microsoft Windows
  9. ^ MyBook World Edition Community of Wikidot
  10. ^ Hacking Western Digital MyBook World Edition
  11. ^ How to install rtorrent on a mybookworld
  12. ^ My Book Premium Edition II
  13. ^ My Book Pro Edition II
  14. ^ My Book World Edition II
  15. ^ .Western Digital Service and Support - How to dismantle a My Book Pro Edition II, My Book Premium Edition II, or My Book World Edition II to replace a hard drive.
  16. ^ How to open the case and remove the hard drive from a Western Digital My Book external enclosure » CarltonBale.com
  17. ^ Morse Code explanation on official Western Digital My Book Webpage.
  18. ^ vnunet.com Review - Western Digital My Book Essential Edition

External links

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