Archive for January, 2009
Western Digital MyBook World Edition II 2TB Ethernet External Hard Drive
Posted by Ivan Bohannon in Network Attached Storage on January 25th, 2009
Western Digital MyBook 2TB NAS
This is a great looking product, extremely easy to use, holds a massive amount of files, and its one of the cheapest Network Attached Storage (NAS) products you can buy.
Unfortunately, its performance is TERRIBLE. The average new SATA hard drive in your desktop PC can write files at around 60 MB/s (60 megabytes a second), or a 5GB file in about 2 minutes. The MyBook World Edition can only write files at around 5 MB/s so that same 5GB file would take 17 minutes. I don’t understand why this product would be more than 10 times slower than a regular hard drive. Heck the Buffalo 1TB external USB hard drive I reviewed last month writes files at 25 MB/s – five times faster than the MyBook.
The MyBook has a Gigabit Ethernet port, which has a max rate of 125 MB/s, it also has TWO internal hard drives, that we know should be able to do 60 MB/s (assuming they are SATA drives, which they probably are). So WHY is this drive so dang slow?
I checked to see if I could reformat the hard drive to make it RAID 0 striped, hoping to improve the performance. Unfortunately the MyBook only offers Raid 1 (redundant data) or drive spanning. So ultimately, because of the bad performance this product is unacceptable. I’m planning on continuing my investigations into NAS products to see if I can find something that actually comes close to maxing out Gigabit Ethernet. I know nothing on the box said “Its really fast!” but I can’t help but feel a little misled.
AT&T did not deliver
Posted by Ivan Bohannon in Ivan's Tech Talk on January 19th, 2009
4 weeks ago, I orderd AT&T DSL after I received a flyer promising a $200 gift card, A free 2-wire wireless home gateway, and guaranteed $35 a month fee for 2 years for the “Elite” service. A few days later I got a message saying that my service had been activated, and reminding me to install the DSL hardware. Well I hadn’t received any hardware yet so I waited. And waited. We got the first bill for the service, $35, but still no hardware and no actual DSL service had been used yet. I tried calling AT&T customer service a few times after work, but the Internet service department was always closed.
Today I gave up waiting for a hardware to show up and called them on my day off. After 38 minutes of hold music I finally got to speak with someone in customer service. The first thing they told me was that one screen in there computer said I had received the hardware, and another screen said I hadn’t. Then she said she would get the hardware right out to me. I told her NO THANK YOU! So in two days the DSL service I never got to use will get disconnected.
NETGEAR WNR 3500 RangeMax Wireless-N Gigabit Router
Posted by Ivan Bohannon in Wireless Networking on January 7th, 2009
Netgear WNR 3500
This router is the main ingredient of the fastest wireless performance I have ever seen. A few weeks ago I wrote about getting 70 Mbps with the Trendnet TEW-624UB and this router. Read the rest of this entry »
