TurnKey! A fantastic Multi-Purpose Storage RAID at a SMOKIN price. XP Hints!!**
Written: Jan 13 '09 (Updated Jan 14 '09)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Comparatively Inexpensive, Sharp, Fast, All-Inclusive & Turn-Key
Cons: One small Windows-oriented caveat (minor) please read review
The Bottom Line: For 250 bucks this thing is just SMOKIN! AND if you're buying as a backup drive, you'll find more purposes for it. Cheap Upgrade path, read review.
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| nick1326's Full Review: Western Digital My Book® Mirror Edition™ (W... |
I'm writing this review in light of the excellent experience I've had with this product in just a short time. This review is on the 2 TB Black edition of the WesternDigital "MyBook" series of external hard drives. The unit is set up as a RAID of 2 1TB drives in one neat box, marketed under the "MyBook" badge. Western Digital makes a slieu fo different products within this specific line, the details of which we will go through later. While I'm certainly no computer genius I AM specific and I hope you'll find this review a thorough look at this product AND at the entire line of MyBook-marketed products. This particular unit is the Gloss-Black-chassis model with ONLY USB connectivity.
I'm hardly a tech geek, in fact I wish oftentimes we could roll back the clock and NOT have all this technology...(jk)... anyhow, I know I'm a bit out of my arena here writing a compuiter-oriented review, but I hope this will be a very helpful and objective look at a fantastic product, even for a non-tech generally-PC-disliking kind of guy! In addition to the product review, I've also included (I hope) an easy guide & technical reference which should make it easier for windows users. I'm really good at writing these kind of white-papers. I'm currently an veteran industry rep within the top of Custom Electronics and a consultant in the CE market. Again, despite my love for electronics as a whole, my feeling on computers is they're a necessary evil.. however as Multi-media oriented units become faster and more reliable I'll be a happier camper!
The reason I originally sought out an external hard-drive was to get piece of mind by backing up my files in a neat and hopefully small-packaged unit. As it happens, I found many more purposes for it and we'll go into those later. Whatever the case, since I run multiple PCs in my home AND I am guilty of being non-dilligent about backing up. Bottom line after a few years off collecting different files in different places etc, it is CLEARLY time to back it ALL up in a neat place, in light of how cheap memory is... It's amazing how quickly technologies evolve, I remember when 500MB (megabytes) was considered "alot" of memory and a single one of those drives (internal) cost a few hundred bucks!.. at least a quick one with a "big" memory buffer, which at the time could have been a whopping megabyte! Let me digress...
These days terabyte drives are common, and in this case they are SO cheap, that I was able to buy this fantastic product, which is essentially a boxed RAID of TWO reasonably-quick Terabyte drives. Considering it comes with a street price of approx. 250 bucks, I have to say, it really is amazing how times (and prices) have changed..
PLEASE NOTE: As this product comes in a few itterations, I know I need to stick to the primary product in the review BUT, it is important to also touch on the others in the line, since the each come configured a bit differently, which can greatly impact the usefulness to a particular end user, based on what kind of computers they use and their objectives with the drive (it is for JUST backup, PERIOD. or perhaps like me, you might be open to other uses etc). In short, I'm just trying to make sure whoever reads this gets the big picture and BUYS THE MOST APPROPRIATE ITTERATION OF IT.
I'm currently using two of the MyBook, but this review is about the exact product listed above - this is the USB-ONLY version of the product. It comes in a variety of names and model-numbers, but essentially the only difference is whether it's a USB-only product, meaning it has connectivity ONLY through USB, OR the other type which has a multi-type rear-panel with FireWire 400, 800 USB and eSATA connectivty. In this review I am going to cover BOTH products, as it can be done in relatively just a few more words anyhow. Epinions currently does not have the technical other model I'm using, which is the "Silver Edition" 2 Terabyte Multi-Connector type which only costs 284 bucks right now! That box contains 2 1-TB (terabyte) drives but with the 4 aforementioned connector types, making it much more versatile and much more suitable (*out of the box) for use for Macs AND PC's or just MACs. In fact, the silver edition is specifically marketed for Macs, but as it happens I use both, and this drive can easily be adapted for such use, and that's why I wrote this review - I felt I could show some specificity and make this easy product even easier which we'll go through later.
ONE MORE DIFFERENCE: Note, the MyBook series is user-settable to be either RAID 0 or RAID 1. THere is NOT a set system of which units come with which (Not all "black" models come with one or the other, they can be set in either, depending on how the product is marketed). FOr reference my black MYBook was set to RAID 1 out of the box, my SILVER (higher priced and newer) version of this WAS NOT SET THIS WAY (evidence by the fact that it rang up as 1.83 TB.. RAID 1 typically HALVES your memory (used for data-redundancy) so I expected to see my silver 2TB show up as really just under 1TB, again it was 1.83 showing that it is set to RAID 0, which does NOT use up half your rated-memory... This is an important aspect to consider, to make sure you purchase the one most appropriate for your application, though you can of course always change this, but it's easier to START WITH IT ONE WAY OR THE OTHER... much more of a pain to start one way and try and change later.. please NOTE!
As of the date of this review the general "best" street price for the exact product listed is around 250 bucks. You can find it even cheaper if you really scrounge, but 249 free shipping is pretty darned cheap. Ultimately, other than obviously 1) capacity and 2) whether USB or Multi are the only differences between all the models, once again. THere is a 1 TB black edition available for just north of 200 bucks and a few accompanying "Multi" type 1 TB that cost around 219-239 or so. There is one other slight difference: The black chassis USB only 1 TB edition comes in an NFS format. The Silver edition is aimed and marketed specifically at a Mac audience, and even says so in the literature and packing. That said, it's formatted in MBR, as it has all 4 different types of connectors aforemtioned. BOTH styles however can be re-formatted to best suit Windows XP and Vista - that would be NTFS. The good news is that it doesn't require a heck of alot of effort to do it.. the bad news is it'll take a nice chunk of time and IT IS NECESSARY TO DO SO.
FOR MULTI-MEDIA USERS and MEDIA-CENTER USERS: Guys, if you're doing any kinda video on your computer (movie rips, larger files 4 GB etc) it is a good idea to not only re-format to NTFS, but also select the largest block assignment possible (in XP it is 64K). Video is one of my specific arenas. Since video files can be really big, allocating a pre-determined system of 64K blocks makes the drive able to manage it's data much more efficiently. In plain english, the thing will run much faster, especially if you're streaming media throughout your home, whether by wire or WiFi. The trade-off (although a minor one) is that if you are storing files smaller than 64K (kilobtyes) the hard drive will still automatically allocate the entire 64k to the file, essentially wasting the superfluous memory. On the other hand, VERY few files are smaller than 64K, and 1 OR 2 TB is alot of memory. Another way to be clever of course, is to create 2 seperate partitions and when you format, make one 64K and make the other native. Make sure you put ONLY movie files and large files in the 64K partition, and the smaller stuff in the other.
WINDOWS XP & VISTA USERS: As stated above, it's real important to format the product in NTFS OUT-OF-THE-GATE. In XP, when you connect it through USB the computer will recognize the device, but it will NOT assign it a letter in the "My Computer" folder, which means you can't use it yet. That's because it's formatted in either MBR or NFS. You can solve this pretty easily by going into control panel and selecting 'classic view.' Go to control panel and follow through the following: Administrative Tools - Computer Management - Storage - Disk Management. In this tool you will find the MyBook drive towards the bottom (notive drives are NUMBERED and not lettered here just yet). Net, this drive should "ring up" as approx 1.83 net TB of memory in this kernel - simply Right-Click on this drive and select "create partition". Doing so will initiate and easy wizard where you can name the drive and specify all the parameters I wrote above. Name it what you want and then GO DO SOMETHING ELSE for about 3 hours!!! You CANNOT select a low-level format, so DO NOT check that box !!!
Aside from this caveat for specifically XP & Vista users (which I'm one of, and I gotta tell ya, it was NOT hard to solve - you do NOT need to monitor the computer or do anything while the thing formats) there are simply NO CONS to this drive, not at THIS PRICE. Not only for the black edition at 250, but at 284 (which is what I paid at B&H in person) the silver edition has connectivity that you find typically only on a sparce handful of products on the 800-900 dollar range!! Holy COw! yeah-I'm serious- go check for yourself! Pleaser realize this applies only to the 4TB area - at 2TB comparable models of those products are in 450-600 dollar range, so at 284 and 250 respectively, the MyBook products simply cannot be beat!
Note, for those of us who still have older pc's with USB 1.1 and NOT USB 2.0 outputs, luckily the USB format is generally backwards compatible, and it has been my experience that all 1.1 devices work, they did for me.
Another note, while the unit comes with an installation disc it is not necessary- again it will just start working and assign a drive letter when you plug it in to USB and power it up. The unit comes with ALL cables and power supplies. NOTE: This means the Silver Edition comes with USB, FireWIRe400, 800 AND eSATA cables and a power supply. Considering this is only 40 or so bucks more than the black edition (which comes with USB cable and power supply), do the math people - it's worth the money even if you don't need the eSATA and FireWire now - it's just future proof, and these types of connectors will become more prevalent especially as whole-house video streaming becomes more common.
USER EXPERIENCE: I could be really snide here and simply say "what do you want me to say, it's a hard drive?!?!" but actually there's quite a bit more to say... Once formatted, I immediately began by backing up ALL my important files from ALL computers, but I also did much more. 1) I MOVED my entire movie library to one hi-cluster partition which is shared. Since I use media-center and cable card, my media server (and AWESOME Niveus Pro-Series N7 Server) can use it's memory solely for cable-card recording purposes. 2) I now link my shared drives and stuck my entire movie library onto the MyBook, effectively making it a mini "NAS" device! since the Niveus makes it a contiguous part of my network along with my router. 3) I did the same for my music libraries and picture libraries. Here's another real-life example of what I'm guilty of: I often take digi-cam pics and sloppily (err.. read: stupidly-haphazzardly) end up sticking them on DIFFERENT computers.. Again guys- how many of us running multiple computers the JUST HAPPEN to have SD & XD slots and are guilty of this?!?! I know I am in spades! Fortunately the MyBook helps me alleviate this by not only consolidating all the data collectively, but in windows utilities, I can even set up automatic backup events (weekly, monthly etc) however I want. What other features can you ask for?? And hot-swappable? you can't ask for more at this price!
The product is really pretty quick, please see the spec sheet below:
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Capacity2TB Interface1x USB 2.0
1x eSATA
1x 6-Pin FireWire-400 2TB Capacity 2TB of capacity allows for storage of approximately 150 hours of uncompressed DV digital video, the equivalent of 425 4.7GB DVD video discs or up to 500,000 MP3 files. RAID 0/1 Modes The array can be configured as a RAID 0 which delivers maximum performance and storage or as RAID 1 for data mirroring at half-storage capacity, protecting your data in case of a drive failure. This gives you extreme flexibility in how you configure your array, ensuring that it meets your specific needs. Quad Interface The drive easily connects to any computer with a FireWire, USB 2.0, or eSATA interface, making it easy to add to any workstation. USB is capable of bus transfer rates of up to 60MBsec, eSATA up to 300MBsec, FireWire-400 up to 50MBsec, and FireWire-800 up to 100MBsec. Hot-Swappable The drive is hot-swappable and plug-and-play so there is no need to turn off your computer while connecting or disconnecting it.
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BOTTOM LINE: At this price, 2 TB of essentially transportable memory, versatile across all platforms PC & Mac and totally hot-swappable drives oriented for multi-media, I guarentee once you buy one with the specific purtpose of "back-up" duty, you'll find it's nice large capacity will make it a great tool for some of the reasons above. I hope is this is the BESTEST Epinions review and most thoughtful, on the product. If you thought so, please rate it! thanks for reading and hope I helped you make a good decision. This product is 100% recommended - With hot-swappable drives at this price, the MyBook is SMOKIN!!
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
nick1326
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Location: Long Island, NY
Reviews written: 232
Trusted by: 93 members
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Music, Motorcycles, Drumming, Surfing, the finest cigars and living life to its fullest...
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