Western Digital My Book

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, that is located on the front of the drive.

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.

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.

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.

The 'MyBook Studio Edition II' contains two drives and is designed to be used as a RAID system for increased performance.

The two drives can be replaced by the user, 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."

The LED gauge has a design issue on these disks. Several[weaselwords] 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. They are accessed as CIFS/SMB shared folders, via NFS or FTP and also feature UPnP, iTunes server functionality and a Twonky media server.

In addition, the World Edition uses WD Anywhere Access to gain remote access to the drive via the internet - although this limits the file types that can be accessed.

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 in older models, where it varies between 36MByte/s, with an average of 4.5MByte/s because of the limited 200MHz clock frequency speed of the ARM processor within. The CPU capacity to handle data is low, as WD Support seems to have answered a customer.. Newer Models compare to USB drive speed at between 10 and 25 MByte/s.

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, at the cost of voiding the warranty. 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, 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, Pro, and World 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.

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 320GB to 2TB. 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. 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. Data transfer speed (WinXP client with CIFS) is roughly 10 MByte/s writing and 16 MByte/s reading on a Gigabit Ethernet link.

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". The first occurrence of "innovative" on the My Book Pro and My Book World Edition features a misspelling and reads "innovateve".

References

^ wdc.com: My Book Studio Edition II 1 TB Hard Drives

^ wdc.custhelp.com: How to dismantle a My Book Studio Edition II or Mirror Edition to replace a hard drive.

^ Anywhere Access FAQ

^ WD Support answer about Network Speed slowness

^

^ MyBook World Edition Community of Wikidot

^ Hacking Western Digital MyBook World Edition

^ How to install rtorrent on a mybookworld

^ My Book Premium Edition II

^ My Book Pro Edition II

^ My Book World Edition II

^ .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.

^ How to open the case and remove the hard drive from a Western Digital My Book external enclosure CarltonBale.com

^ Morse Code explanation on official Western Digital My Book Webpage.

^ vnunet.com Review - Western Digital My Book Essential Edition

External links

Western Digital My Book

Western Digital My Book Editions

Community driven wiki on how to hack the My Book World Edition

Website on how to hack the My Book World Edition

Wiki on how to hack the My Book World Edition for Linux newbies, plus automated installations (FTP server, emule client, torrent client)

Guide How to integrate the external USB-Harddrive into Standard Mediaserver on My Book World Edition (German)

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