My Book Live DUO 8TB Review

Cloud, Cloud, Cloud!

Cloud services, or those services that allow you to save your information in archives accessible anywhere via the Internet, are certainly one of the fastest growing markets in the IT world. In a recent study, IDC forecast growth of 27,6% year-on-year with spending that will represent nearly 46% of global IT spending by 2015, which translates into one dollar spent by users in this field for every 7 dedicated to purchase of hardware and software.

Those who use these services intensively and need to store large amounts of data, know that often a solution can be represented by the configuration of a Private Cloud, or a local archive accessible via the internet only by a small circle of users, belonging to of your family group or your work team.

The newest member of the WD network storage family, specialist in the storage sector, My Book Live Duo promises its users great flexibility in terms of storage and backup, thanks to the presence of two RAID disks and an incredible ease of installation and configuration of your cloud network.

Storage: RAID 0, 1, JBOD what do you want most from life?

The My Book live Duo, (the one used in our test was equipped with the beauty of two Caviar disks of 4 Terabytes CAVIAR GREEN both passively cooled for a total of 8TB), is configured as standard as RAID 0 (all the capacity of the two disks available) but it can be easily configured in Raid 1, certainly the safest mode of use as the entire content of a disk is replicated on the other, allowing you in case of failure of one of the two drives not to lose yours work; or in JBOD, where the second disk is used only when the first is full.

Everything is managed through an incredibly simple web interface that even the less experienced will be able to master with confidence after a few uses.

In terms of reading and writing speed, thanks to an efficient and powerful 800mhz PowerPC processor, the My Book Live DUO 8tb guarantees respectable performance, especially with large files (15gb in a single Mkv file), reaching the speed transfer of about 91.0 mbytes per second, which makes it a perfect choice in the multimedia field; its performance drops and aligns with competitors' products when the same amount of data is split across multiple files and folders, with performance averaging around 35,0 mbyte / s reading and 28,0 mbyte / s in writing.

The drive is also equipped on the back with a USB 2.0 port (questionable choice given the overall quality of the device, we would certainly have appreciated a USB 3.0) useful for expanding the storage capacities of the My Book live Duo (also online), and a port gigabyte ethernet whose performance we will talk about later.

The two 3.5 "discs, as mentioned, are from the Caviar Green series at 5400 rpm to ensure more stability and lower energy consumption and are easily accessible from the top of the device by removing a small pushpull plastic grid

Personal Cloud Configuration

The added value of this My Book Live Duo is certainly its ability to be connected to the home or office network and configured with extreme ease for the creation of a Personal Cloud.

As soon as the device is connected, it will be visible from both Mac and PC and it will be possible to install the software on it.

The software not only allows remote users to be configured and accessed via mobile devices, using the excellent WD 2go application (available for Android and iOS), but also to change the standard drive configuration on-the-go. from Raid 0 to 1 or jBOD, without losing any of the data previously installed on the device.

Users, mobile or not, can have unlimited access to the disk, limited access for a time, or even just one partition of the disk using activation codes.

The performance of the Gigabit Ethernet port is very good, with average speeds around 66 MB / S and writing speeds of 53 MB / S (tests carried out on networks with Fritz! Box 7390 by AVM router).

Conclusions and judgment.

My book LIVE DUO is an incredibly reliable and versatile solution, which combines storage quality and ease of configuration. Anyone, pro or consumer user, is interested in a product that allows them to store a huge amount of data and make them accessible anywhere through the Cloud at an accessible price considering also the capacities (the 8Tb version has a price of 459 euros on Amazon), can definitely put this device at the top of the list, guarantees Western Digital.