Review: Western Digital My Book Live Duo

If you're still making excuses about why you aren't running local data back-ups, this drive is prepared to shoot down every one of your tepid arguments.

With the My Book Live Duo, Western Digital updates its venerable line of network-attached storage devices. The biggest upgrade is in the "Duo" part of the name: This is WD's first dual-drive NAS, and the addition of RAID means your data should be safe from anything short of a house-frying power surge, or a disaster that levels your entire home.

4TB of total storage is included (a 6TB version is coming), giving you 2TB to work with if you go for a redundant/mirrored configuration. Once you connect the drive – which is largely plug and play, no router futzing required – you then manage all of its features on your primary PC via the passel of applications included.

While WD has upgraded some of its management software, things are still more complicated than they need to be. Novices may be a bit confused deciding whether to use WD SmartWare (for backup configuration and stats), WD Quick View (a drive health widget), or simply open up Windows Explorer to manage files (pretty much the easiest way). There's also an unnamed web interface to the drive that's used for everything else. And that doesn't even mention the three iOS and Android applications you can use to access and upload photos to the device (WD Photos) or manage all your data on the drive (the free WD 2go and the $3 WD 2go Pro).

__Read our Buying Guide for external storage drives.__The best news: WD has mercifully jettisoned the old and buggy system for cloud-based access that was included with its prior NAS, but the new version is still a bit overly complicated to set up. Namely, users have to be created on one screen, then connected to an e-mail address on another. Once that e-mail account receives a confirmation code, then you can actually access the drive via the wd2go.com website. A completely different process is used to configure an account for smartphone access.

It's understandable, I guess. WD is a company that basically doesn't do anything except make hard drives, so it's probably not surprising that its software chops aren't up to snuff, nor that it fails to understand that consumers who buy a device like the Live Duo don't want to spend hours managing the intricate details of their storage infrastructure.

The good news is that once you jump through all the configuration hoops, the Duo works exceptionally well. Remote access and local network sharing are all speedy and free of the hiccups that plagued last year's model, proving that, even though it might have been designed by and for engineers, they got most of it right in the end.

WIRED Broad Mac, PC, and consumer device support. Works with Time Machine, DLNA devices, you name it. An affordable way to add lots of RAID-protected storage for backup, media serving, or both. Solid performance. USB port available should you wish to expand storage capacity further.

TIRED Files uploaded via iPhone app get renamed. Still no social networking hooks for auto-uploading photos or videos. Costly at $400 (the 2TB version was $170 last year), though that may have more to do with the constantly fluctuating cost of storage drives than anything else.