WD My Book World Edition NAS Device

Name: WD My Book World Edition NAS Device - Page 3
Brand: WD

by Daniel A. Begun — Wednesday, May 20, 2009, 10:30 AM EDT

Initial Setup

As soon the WD My Book World Edition is powered on and attached to your network, it automatically retrieves an IP address via DHCP from your network's router. If you have the means of gleaning the device's assigned IP address or device name, you could conceivably start using it right away without every cracking open a manual or launching the bundled software. Otherwise, on Windows systems, you'll want to insert the included CD and launch the WD Discovery Tool application.

The installation wizard walks you through
setting up the NAS device.

On Windows systems, you can install the
WD Discovery Tool, WD Anywhere
Backup software, or setup a
MioNet account for remote access.

The WD Discovery Tool will display all of the WD drives it finds on the network. When you click on the name of your drive, a Things To Do column on the right side of the window gives you the following options: Configure, Map Network Drive, Browse Network Shares, and Create Desktop Shortcut. Selecting Configure will launch your system's default Web browser and open up to the WD My Book World Edition's web-based Network Storage Manager interface. The Map Network Drive feature will automatically create drive letter mappings for all available network shares. If you use the mapping feature at this early stage, it will only create mappings for the two default public folders: Download and Public. You can also use the software to manually map drive letters to available shares. The Browse Network Shares feature shows you all of the available network folders--which won't be many when you first start out with the device. You might want to wait to map drives until after you've set up your users and folder shares.

The WD Discovery Tool lets you configure
the device, map network drives,
browse network shares, and
create desktop shortcuts.

Initially the only available folder shares
are the Download and Public
public folders.

The Create Desktop Shortcut option will put a shortcut to the WD My Book World Edition on your desktop. This shortcut is actually a shortcut to the IP address of the device, so as you add folders to the drive over time, the new folders will appear in the window whenever you click on the shortcut. If the WD My Book World Edition get its IP address via DHCP and the device reboots for any reason, there is chance that the device's IP address could change. If this happens, the IP-based desktop shortcut will no longer work. This actually happened to us during testing. We highly recommend assigning a static IP address to the WD My Book World Edition.

Windows desktop shortcuts.

Folder shares.

There is no WD Discovery Tool for Mac set up, but the instructions explain how to access the drive via Finder and suggest creating an alias on the Mac desktop so that you'll have an easy desktop shortcut to the drive. Oddly, we had trouble connecting to the device via a Finder window on two different Mac systems--we kept getting connection failed errors, and ultimately instead had to connect to the device using the Finder's Connect to Server option. The CD also includes Windows and Mac versions of the automated backup software, WD AnyWhere Backup.