Monday, May 5, 2008

It has been a year...

Well it has been over a year since my last post. I wish I could say that I am still using the My Book World-II but, alas it died. It did so about 8 months ago. Not very long lived. I believe it was sensitive to heat and it was in a room that did not receive proper air conditioning.

Anyway, at this point, even if it had survived, I would not have recommended the device to anyone. The fact that it is a network device is a double edged sword. It is nice that I can access the data from any computer in the house without having to have another computer turned on. The transfer rate, though, pretty much negates this as a real benefit. And besides, I used it as a store for my video collection that was served up to my media server from my office computer. Without the computer being on, the data was not accessible to the one device that really needed it.

The more I played with Mionet the more I disliked the product. Before the device died, I had completely removed it from my system and relied solely on public shares. Mionet caused my machine to be unstable. It did not play well with remote desktop and flat did not work if two or more people had active "switch user" sessions running in the background. All in all it was a good idea poorly implemented. I had actually bought the first year and canceled it before it renewed. It was not stable enough to actually trust. I actually did try to play a song and a video remotely. It downloads the whole thing before it starts. NOT useful.

I have since purchased two other external USB 2.0 drives (1TB and 750GB) and I am happy with both. I will probably never purchase a network attached device again.

If you do have a My Book World and you like it. Great! Before mine died I found that it was running a distro of Linux under the covers and I was actually able to SSH into it and look around. I was able to start an NFS server and I had almost gotten a media server compiled and working on it before it finally bit the dust. This raised the "cool" factor for me quite a bit. If there was anything that would entice me to try it again it would be this capability. Search Google for "hacking my book world" for examples on how to get inside.

This is likely to be my last post on the subject, though I will continue to respond to comments. Seeing as how I have only had one comment in over a year, that is not much of a commitment :)

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