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An affordable way to add lots of RAID-protected storage for backup, media serving, or both.

This two-bay box offers a lot of capacity for the buck and streams large files very well, but features are otherwise limited.

The My Book Live Duo is great for home users who want to stream media; but small-business users will be better served by a box that delivers faster overall performance and has more-advanced features.

Western Digital's MyBook Live Duo is a good entry point into the world of NAS. The lack of active cooling is a concern, though — make sure that it's in a position where it can vent its heat easily.

Our WD Duo has worked brilliantly, the set-up is easy - if a little laboured for the RAID initialisation - and we feel our data is safer than before. Low power standbye also means this drive makes a better home media server than your power-hungry home PC.

Creating volumes to share with other users is a little cumbersome, especially if you want to give them internet access, and it can be a little sluggish at times. Even so, it strikes a good overall balance between ease of use and flexibility of features.

If you like the features and price of the single-drive My Book Live, you'll like the Duo even more.