Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I found the product I got to be way better than the reviews indicated. The main reason seems to be software updates. You should really ignore any complaints you read about the device from 2010, and a lot of them from 2011. The physical hardware is just a basic drive with a processor and a network connection. What makes a difference is the software - both on the drive, and the mybooklive website/iphone apps. Most of the complaints I was worried about turned out to have been fixed in the latest software. For example: A review complained about iTunes media sharing being broken by the latest iTunes update - I had no problem doing iTunes media sharing with the latest iTunes. A review complained about the Mio-net connectivity - This device no longer uses Mio-net. The mybooklive website lets you map your home mybook live drive as a network drive from any computer away from home. Its like at work where you have a network drive, but this is your home drive. You do have to keep in mind the data speeds are limited by the speed of your home internet connection. I also use the iphone apps. They have some cool features like caching built in. So when I pull down some pictures, they get stored on my iphone so that looking at them multiple times is quick. And the cache has a configurable limit. Setup is super easy. With almost no configuration I got iTunes media streaming, sharing of videos and pictures on my PS3, mapping this as a network drive to a relative's computer, and mapping this drive to computers in my house. Consolidating data to a central spot is something everyone wants to do, and there are a lot of network drives out there. But the sofware that comes with this device that makes everything so easy is what really makes the difference. One last note - you will need to backup this drive. As a single drive it is vulnerable. A super cool feature is that this drive actually has software to back itself up. You tell it a computer on your network to use (any computer it can see works, you don't need a special kind), and it will perform the backup to that computer. This means your data, as well as all the permissions you setup on the drive. So it might be a good idea to buy a cheap extra drive that you will use as a backup to your backup.