WD MyBook World Edition

[PeteSmith]

Hi, Just a quickie.. I'm thinking about getting one of these WD MyBook World Edition external hard drives to back up data stored on the home PC's, now i have just read this
which makes me think this might just be an expensive paper weight, what is the point in having a shared network HD if the most widely used media file extensions are blocked.

Does anyone have one of these and is there an easy way to share media to your home PC's? Without Samba

Will using the USB, Firewire connections bypass this limitation and allow media access accross different PC's.

I should point out that although i do want to access my MP3's, AVI's etc from multiple pc's i do not necessarily need to copy them to other machines, although the ability to do so would be nice

I'm really after a central location to store my media and documents that can be accessed from any machine on the network, without having a dedicated server to do so, and does not require having to turn on each machine.

And if not can anyone recommend something similar that does the job its designed to do without these silly limitations? Do the lesser mybook versions have this 'feature'

[pepsi_max2k]

the above "no mp3s/avis/anything" link only relates to internet access of files, and only then when using wd's own Anywhere Access program. for sharing over a lan you should be fine.

[peterb]

Does anyone have one of these and is there an easy way to share media to your home PC's? Without Samba

Will using the USB, Firewire connections bypass this limitation and allow media access accross different PC's.

SAMBA is just an open source implementation of the SMB (Server Message Block) protocol that Windows uses for file and printer sharing. Your Windows PCs already understand SMB - SAMBA just happens to be the implementation of SMB on this file server to make it operate with windows - you don't have to install anything on the PCs.

[PeteSmith]

SAMBA is just an open source implementation of the SMB (Server Message Block) protocol that Windows uses for file and printer sharing. Your Windows PCs already understand SMB - SAMBA just happens to be the implementation of SMB on this file server to make it operate with windows - you don't have to install anything on the PCs.

Great, thanks to both for the info, i think the website blurb was perhaps a little misleading.