Kudos and caveats are in order that week as we take two prominent hardware manufacturers to task for their good, poor and ugly product lines.

Ever since Western Digital introduced its My Book series of external hard drives, I’ve been singing its praises. Available in sizes ranging from a meager 160GB to a whopping 2TB — which are essentially multiple 500GB drives housed in one case — the devices are low-priced, dependable and nicely portable.

Although hardly the first or only external hard drives on the market, Western Digital has achieved tremendous success with My Book, flooding the market with no less than seven different versions: the Home Edition, Office Edition, Studio Edition, fundamental Edition, Premium Edition, Pro Edition and World Edition. The drives’ outer casing is designed to resemble a black hardback book, with the exception of the silver Pro and white World series.

Many users might not have noticed, but one of the product’s

most strange features is the vent holes on the top, bottom and rear of each unit, designed to spell out a knowledge in Morse cipher: “personal, dependable, innovative, simple and design.” Subtle but intelligent.

Unfortunately, several thorns have sprouted on that digital rose. Not substance to leave well adequate alone, Western Digital has snuck some significant limitations into its network-ready World Edition drives. The company has taken a beating from confused and angry customers, and for good reason.

In a nutshell, the Ethernet versions of the My Book utilize Digital Rights Management to monitor and control the types of info users can copy to and from these drives. For those unfamiliar with DRM, it’s basically technology used to protect copyrighted digital media — primarily music and video — such as MP3, DivX, AVI, WMV and QuickTime files. In theory, it’s a good thing, but in practice, it’s becoming a…

Orginal post by Top Tech News