Avoid Western Digital NAS units

A simple word of advice - until Western Digital fix the issues with this device, avoid the WD MyBook World Edition II network attached storage.

Clear gigabit LAN, everything linked at gig wire speeds, and you can only write to it at around 20-30 megabits/sec (read speed appears capped to 50 megabits/sec).

My theory is it's Linux-based software RAID 1 and has a cheap nasty underpowered CPU in there causing a bottleneck. The drives are bound to be SATA-300, you'd think, being a pair of 750GB units (can be configured to 1.5TB RAID 0 or 750GB RAID 1). Why bother putting a gigabit interface on the back if you can't use it?

It also cannot be configured to authenticate against a Windows domain - not a huge problem for us, it's just for departmental use, so we just create matching accounts on the NAS you would think? (matching SMB usernames and password hashes... no authentication prompts) Bigger problem when your username is 4 characters long and the device won't let you create accounts with usernames shorter than 5 characters.