!!! I've got some space !!!
WD My Book World Edition 2TB White Light Edition (WDH1NC20000)
Yippeee!!! I got my disk.
This disk basically a NAS(Network Attached Storage) drive. It comes with a pre-installed Linux. It is a cut down version of Linux. That means Users, file permission groups etc etc basic features of Linux comes into the picture. So you can be pretty sure that only authorized users will be accessing your data. And its pretty good once you have your data on Network.
As I said Linux, no need to worry to all those who don't have knowledge of Linux. It's has got a pretty decent web interface to control & configure the disk properties. Thanks to the httpd service running on it. :)
Apart from that it has got a licensed version of Twonky media server. You can configure Twonky media server to share videos, music and pictures. And the same can be accessed by any PC, cellphone or any other device in the Network. Using web interface you can also enable services like NFS, AFP and FTP.
It has also got iTunes media sharing service running. So iTunes lovers will see this disk under "Sharing" section of iTunes. :)
Cons:
Although this unit Gigabit LAN capable, the data transfer rate is pretty slow over the network. I got max speed of 1350 kB/s while transferring data from my PC/USB Drive to the disk over the 100Mbps LAN card.
Initially I thought I didn't configure the disk properly but after going through blogs & forums I got to know that this disk is powered by ARM9 processor running at 200 MHz. Well I'm still not sure that this is the bottle neck in my case. I google on this a bit more and found that this processor can be over clocked to 500MHz. Probabilily this could improve the data transfer rate. But I didn't tried.
Anyways I got most of data on WD 160 GB USB disk. So I connect my USB disk to the USB port available at the back of the 2TB unit. This basically exposes the USB disk as a network share. To transfer the data logged in to the disk using SSH and fired "cp" command to transfer all my data. And guess what I transferred 50 GB of data in approximately 53 minutes. Pretty impressive...huh !!! ;)
Now since all my data is a one place I really don't need to do a lot of bulk transfer over the LAN. All that data dumping stuff was a one time task and I'm done with that.
To summarize, it's a pretty impressive unit to have your data at one place and share it in home with different PC's/devices(I use my cellphone a lot ;) ). With the Linux in place adds data security. Twonky & iTunes software makes this disk a perfect media server and I'm pretty happy with it after backing up my data.
And special thanks to Mini who brought this for me. :)
