Minimally Exceptional

Once it’s common for computers to have one or more terabytes of storage, what will we call it?

Will we call it a ‘ter,’ kind of like a ‘gig’ or a ‘meg?’ Will we call it a Tera? Or will we just refer to it by it’s common name – a ‘metric shit ton’?

I have crossed the magical 1T mark on my home computer. I already had a 250 and a 300 in my desktop, and last night I bought a 500gb external drive. It’s pretty neat, actually. It connects to my router and is a network enabled device, so I can hook it up to any computer on my home network, including my laptop with wireless networking.

As neat as it is, I have a little bit of a bitch about it: Proprietary software.

It uses the MIOnet service to connect the hard drive to your computer. It also uses MIOnet for remote access. If I leave my modem, router, and drive powered on and connected, I can access the contents of the drive from any internet connected computer by grabbing the MIOnet client off of their website.

Neat concept, but it really irks me that I have to install and use their bullshit just to get the basic functionality out of the device. Especially considering that the software wants to be connected to the internet all the time. I just didn’t want to use it, and it’s kind of a deal breaker.

Fortunately I was able to get around it. I’m actually really pleased with myself that I figured it out. Since I’m not much of a techie these days, I’m always a little worried that I’m losing the little bit of tech savvy that I still have.

It’s a Western Digital MyBook world edition. I haven’t been able to find anything about how to get around the proprietary software, so here’s how I did it just in case anyone is out there googling for answers.

Here’s some basic network information. I have 4 devices on my home network. Two desktop PCs (one running XP Pro and one running XP Home), a laptop running XP Media Center 2005, and a nintendo Wii. I use Earthlink DSL for my internet connection, and I have a netgear wireless router. I can’t remember the model number on the router.

So I sat here for a long time last night trying to map a network drive to the mybook. No luck. Windows network could detect the device, and see that it had two folders, but neither of them would map to a drive letter. I was prompted for a username and password, and the login information that I had set up when I initially installed the device didn’t work.

Then, on a whim, I logged into my router configuration, where I could check the status of connected devices.

I guess it’s worth mentioning that I manually assign local IP addresses to all of my devices. I need to do this so that I can open specific ports to use with bittorrent, which I use quite a bit. So all of my devices are 192.168.1.XXX, where I assign the XXX. My Wii is 192.168.1.4, my PC is 192.168.1.2, et cetera. The myBook was being automatically assigned an IP address of 192.168.1.4 (the Wii was off and so the address was not in use.)

That’s when something useful hit me – what if I just tried access that address via firefox?

Well I did – and it took me to a manual configuration screen for the mybook and prompted me for a login and password.

Here the login and password from the initial setup worked. Within the config pages of the drive, I was able to do all kinds of stuff. Set up users and passwords, manage file shares, and manually assign the drive an IP address. So I did all those things. I set up a username and password, I set up a file share (essentially just a folder on the root of the drive that will serve as the ‘root’ of the share,) and I forced the IP address to be the next in the sequence of available numbers.

Well guess what? If I try to map a network drive, let’s call it Y:, to \\192.168.1.X\SHARE, it prompts me for a username and password. If I use the name and password that I set up in advanced settings, the SHARE folder maps to y: as the root.

Perfect. Exactly what I was looking for. I uninstalled the crappy software, rebooted all computers, and mapped the drive to each computer just to make sure it works.

My initial thoughts on the drive itself is that it’s very asthetically pleasing. It’s glossy white with blue accent lights – think the Wii – and isn’t nearly as big as I’d expected it to be. It’s a little noisy depending on how you stand it up and what you have it set on, but it’s no louder than a cpu fan. Performance wise, I haven’t had a lot of time to do anything with it as it’s only been a day, but it seems to be a little on the slow with write speeds. I’m not really suprised. I’m not using gigabit networking or anything. Probably no slower than a connection to a standard external USB drive.

So anyway, that’s my story. I’m going to go see how quickly I can fill a .5 terabyte drive.