Advertisment

WD My Net N900 Central - Unique Combo of a NA S device-cum-router

author-image
S Aadeetya
New Update

Western Digital (WD) has come up with a rather unique offering with the My Net N900 Central, a device that is, most likely, the first of its kind. It's a NAS device with a dual-band Wi-Fi router built in, which essentially allows users to stream their media from a 1TB storage device wirelessly to all their Wi-Fi-enabled devices. As a router, it is obviously more complex to set up as compared to other shortlisted products in this category (e.g. keyboard), but it's fairly easy to start. The N900 comes with an optional CD installer, which is mostly for adding the WD SmartWare configuration and backup software.

Once you set it up, you can appreciate the performance of the My Net N900. The web interface of this WD device is neat and simple to access. The router works well in two frequencies, 2.4GHz & 5.0GHz, which lets you utilize the bandwidth available to the most. The sheer range of features is also impressive, whether you're talking about mobile access or configuring its various Wi-Fi settings. If you want to access the router storage remotely, you can do that with the help of cloud. For that, you need to install the "WD2GO" app, which is freely available in the Google and Apple store. The WD N900 also lets you set up a hotspot for guests where they can surf the Web and not have access to your files; you can easily filter out any inappropriate content. A feature called FastTrack divides up the bandwidth for multiple connections and prioritizes audio and video streams to ensure they run smoothly. Streaming of all the media works pretty well; even streaming HD media wirelessly runs smoothly.

We tested the N900 with an assortment of files of size 50MB. After uploading the files to router storage and then downloading the files on the connected computer, we got a speed of 50MB in 50 seconds. Under QBENCH benchmark, it clocked 88MBps making for an excellent throughput under 1000KB payload; better than the Buffalo AirStation HP N450 and many other routers we've tested so far. Overall, the Western Digital My Net N900 is a good buy for those intimidated by the term "network attached storage," "router," or both.

Advertisment