Last year I decided to ditch the desktop PC and move to a laptop for day-to-day use. I’d been using USB hard drives to supplement the 1Tb storage but this meant my laptop was generally tied to the desk.
Anyway I decided (having upgraded to Gigabit Lan) that Network Attached Storage was the way forward.
After much deliberation I went for Western Digital’s offering, encouraged mainly by the “Cloud Storage”
This is probably the easiest bit of hardware I’ve installed, plug in, install the software then access the drive through a web page to setup sharing and security.
Once setup, you can go to wd2go.com and map the cloud storage on your PC. (There’s also apps for android and iOS to access the drive from your tablet)
Make sure you only use these links when away from your home network though (When at home find the drive through the “network” section of Windows Explorer). Using the cloud service internally will hammer your bandwidth as your data does a lap of the Internet each time you read or write.
To top it off the drive comes with a media server built in, so I can stream all my music and videos through my blu-ray player.
So far I’ve had only one technical hitch. My laptop crashed and when it came back up Windows kept bringing up a password box and telling me I didn’t have permissions to access the directory.
I found loads of people asking the same question on the Internet, but very few answers. Turns out that the way to fix it is to go to Credential Manager in Control Panel, in here I found a Windows Credential for the device, a quick edit to put in the user name and password I set up on the device and everything started working again. 😀
Apart from that, the drive looks good and almost silent (just the occasional HD whir) and is well worth the higher cost over USB storage. The 3Tb option should be enough for most users, but just to be on the safe side I’ve bought another. (Oh and put the drives out of the USB caddies into my old PC to create a Linux server with 4Tb of space… but that’s another story)
