I am not normally a negative person, so when I say that the Western Digital MyBook network storage system is a revolting piece of vile, slimy bat poo with no redeeming features, you should take it to mean this is a product you wish to avoid.

The cause of my strong emotion is that I bought one of these things a year ago to use for network backup storage and, while it is certainly true that they lied when they said the box has gigabit network connectivitity -- you could inscribe cuneiform on a clay tablet faster than this thing writes -- it did actually manage to accept backups.

Until a couple of weeks ago, when it stopped working, which I didn't notice until yesterday because I don't check backups every day.

I have just spent the last 24 hours struggling to work out what's wrong. With mere days before I go on hols, and then disappear for three weeks leaving my wife to look after the girls, there are better things I could have spent my time doing, but coming from my background I am most unwilling to leave any computer without a working backup system.

As near as I can tell, either the processor or the network circuitry, which has always been marginal, has degraded to the point it's physically incapable of keeping up with the data flow, at which point the controlling software spuriously reports the disk is full, which causes the backup software to bomb out.

So the odds are pretty good that some time tomorrow I'll be buying a new network storage system, and it won't be Western Digital.