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Saturday, January 28, 2012

You're Missing Out: Personal Cloud Storage



This is a network drive so it is designed to connect to a router or directly to your computer with an ethernet cable.  The big advantage of a network drive or NAS (Network Attached Storage), is that once it is on the home network, files on the drive are accessible from any computer or device on the home network.  That means your files can be accessible from smart phones, smart TV's and other networked devices like the Logitech Revue.

You can even set it up so that you can access your files remotely with a username and password.  If you don't like Drop Box or Google Drive you can setup your own personal cloud storage with this product from Western Digital.  And you don't have to be a geek to do it.  The setup wizard walks you through the process.

DLNA compliant devices on your network will recognize the Western Digital My Book Live as a media server so that you can view pictures, movies and listen to music.  It's probably a good idea to make sure your home network is fast.  I would recommend connecting this drive to a gigabit router like this Buffalo Air Station.  This will ensure that your read/write speeds are optimized and streaming to multiple computers or DLNA displays around your home simultaneously will look crystal clear.