After a lot of research I purchased a WD My Book World Edition II 4Tb NAS and installed it yesterday. It is not the fastest NAS, but seemed to be a reasonable compromise between speed and cost. I am using an 8 port D-Link DGS-2208 GigaBit switch. I have a Macbook Pro and a Mac Mini ( used as media computer ) Both of my Mac are running Snow Leopard 10.6.2. I have the 9000 Jumbo frames enabled on both macs. THis seemed to improve performance over the Gb cable connection. I have two other XP computers and they worked well with the new NAS as well. The unit is quite ( No fan ) and does not seem to generate much heat.
My old NAS system was a pair of 320Gb Iomega USB drives attached to my US Robotics 8200 VPN router ( Yea I still love the old gal ) so even though the WD NAS it is not up to the speed of the more expensive NAS units it was a significant boost in transfer speed from my old system. I also needed to store files larger than what FAT32 can handle ( FAT & FAT32 are the only options in the old USR 8200 ) I am running it as a RAID 1 and will get a 2Tb USB drive to backup the WD NAS. Much of my computing is done over Wifi so max performance was not one of my goals for the new NAS.
I was happy to see that there was a new firmware available that adds Apple Time Machine compatibility. I chose the auto firmware update in the Advanced WEB interface and it worked without a hitch. The two Macs and Time Machine worked flawlessly with the unit. The new Firmware also allows for unattended downloads as well. No scheduled backups yet, but at least it added a few options.
I have a medium size mp3 music library and I put it on the NAS and enabled the iTune media severs and I could see it on the Macbook and Mini immediately. I was disappointed in that it did not seem to understand my m3u playlists I have in the shared music directory. The NAS uses the Twonky media server 5.1 and after looking at their site, it may be a problem with this version of the server. So, if you want this NAS primarly as an iTune server, you might be dissapointed....
Overall, it suits my needs and seem to have adequate performance at a reasonable price.Get more detail about Western Digital My Book World Edition II - 2 TB (2 x 1 TB) Network Attached Storage WDH2NC20000N (White).
