My Book is a series of external hard drives produced by Western Digital. There are currently nine series of My Book drives: Essential Edition, Home Edition, Office Edition, Mirror Edition, Studio Edition, Premium Edition, Elite Edition, Pro Edition, AV Dvr "Live Edition", and the World Edition.
My Book drives are designed to look like a standard black hardback book, with the exception of the Pro/Studio series, which are silver, and the World series, which are white. Other than the book-like appearance of the drive's case, My Book drives originally featured vent holes on the top of the drives which spelled out a message in Morse code.
Models
Essential Edition
In addition to the book-like design, the My Book Essential Edition drives have an Intelligent Power Management feature that stops the drive platters after ten minutes of inactivity, rather than the usual expedient of slowing them down. The unit also turns on and off with the computer it is attached to.
Essential Edition My Book drives are almost entirely black, with the exception of a single blue light, used to indicate power and activity, or a circular green light that is located on the front of the drive. The older model has a white light.
"Essential Edition" drives used USB 2.0 for connectivity are available in capacities of 80 GB, 160 GB, 250 GB, 320 GB, 400 GB, 500 GB and 750 GB.
Premium Edition
Premium Edition drives are similar to the Essential Edition model but also include FireWire 400 ports, an integrated visual capacity gauge and Western Digital backup software.
Premium Edition My Book drives have the same black case as Essential Edition drives; however, the light surrounding the power button is blue. Also, inside the standard blue light is another blue ring light that contains eight individual segments which indicate the remaining space on the drive. This edition is available with storage capacities of 160 GB, 250 GB, 320 GB, 400 GB, and 750 GB.
Pro Edition
The Pro Edition My Books contain all of the features of the Premium Edition ones, but with added FireWire 800 connectivity for fast data transfer. In addition, the Pro Edition My Books replaced the Western Digital backup software found on the Premium Editions with EMC Retrospect Express backup and recovery software.
Pro Edition My Book drives have the same basic case design as Premium Edition drives; however, the case is silver rather than black. In addition, it includes a circular blue capacity gauge LED divided into six segments (representing 17% of usage per segment) and an outer ring that represents drive activity.
The Pro Edition My Book is marketed as a RAID solution that can be used as a backup device.
Pro Edition II
This edition was available with storage capacities of 500 GB, 640 GB, 1 TB, 1.5 TB, and 2 TB.
Premium Edition II
This edition is black and was available with storage capacities of 500 GB, 640 GB, 1 TB, 1.5 TB, and 2 TB.
World Edition
The World Edition My Books function as network-attached storage (NAS), by way of an Ethernet interface. They also feature an extra USB host port to allow an additional USB drive to be daisy chained. Data on first generation (Blue Rings) My Book World is accessed as CIFS/SMB shared folders. The second generation (White Lights) expands the access choices to include NFS, FTP, an iTunes server, and a Twonky media server.
In addition, the World Edition uses WD Anywhere Access to gain remote access to the drive via the Internet.
It has the same basic case design as the Premium Edition drives, including the capacity gauge, except the color of the World Edition is white. It has the same Morse code ventilation as the other editions.
Network speed
Although My Book Ethernet-capable disks come with a Gigabit Ethernet interface, the network speed is significantly slower. Especially for older "blue rings" models (200 MHz ARM CPU and 32 MiB RAM), where it varies between 3–6 MB/s, with an average of 4.5 MB/s. The newer "white lights" My Book World Edition 1 TB and 2 TB storage capacity models, WDH1NC and WDH2NC (oxnas810, 380 MHz ARM CPU and 128 MiB RAM), have drive speeds comparable to USB, at about 10 MB/s write and 25 MB/s read.
The "white lights" WDH1NC is jumbo frames capable and can achieve ~36 MB/s reading and ~18 MB/s writing speed over Gigabit Ethernet.