Review on 📚 WD My Book Studio II - 2TB (2x1TB) USB 2.0/FireWire 800/eSATA Desktop External Hard Drive with Enhanced SEO by Maalik Harris

My 2TB Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk hard drive that I was using as an automatic backup is starting to fail and it's the second hard drive of the same type that's in a bit more Caused problems for over a year (I bought a couple of these just under a year ago and the first one died after 5 months). I decided to try a Raid 1 drive for some redundancy and data security. The cheapest drive of its size on the market is the WD My Book Studio II; Since I'm using a 2008 iMac, Firewire 800 is the fastest interface available (and my preferred interface anyway). I already have one of these drives where I store my wife's photos, but I only activate it when archiving. I had such good results that I decided to use one of these as my Time Machine drive. The drive worked great out of the box. I have had great service from WD drives in the past and have no complaints yet. The drive was preformatted with HFS+ (Journaled) with a GUID partition as a pair of spanned 4TB drives. The installation CD contains Mac and Windows drivers and a manual. I installed the drivers (turned out to be the same versions I had already installed from another hard drive), connected the cables and turned on the power. I selected Disk Manager in the menu bar, selected the disk, told it to switch to Raid 1, and after about a minute the disk became a 2GB Raid 1 mirror. I then used Carbon Copy Cloner to transfer the data from the old hard drive, waited a night (and then several), selected it as a backup disk in Time Machine, and you're done. No problems, no hassles, no complaints as I have seen below. The cloning process took a long time, but I moved 2TB of material through the external interface, which takes time. To transfer a hard drive, Time Machine CCC requires a block transfer, not a file transfer, and it must pass verification at the end, so the whole process took about 15 hours. Raid 1 also requires redundant writes for everything, so it's a bit slower than just merging disks. Because it is a RAID 1 drive, the same data is duplicated across two drives in the device. If one of them fails, open the top, remove the latches, pull out the bad block, install the new block, close and wait for the new drive to be mirrored by the internal software. (My device contains WD Green drives, so their power consumption is reduced.) In a worst-case scenario, the device's hard drive controller could fail and damage both drives, but hassle-free case replacement and drive migration is the more likely scenario. There's no such thing as a totally secure solution, but it's a lot better than relying on a single backup drive. The WD Drive Manager software constantly monitors the health of the drives and controller circuitry, and provides alerts when (hopefully) something starts to fail. So far I haven't had any issues with the drive freezing after sleeping like some have complained about. There is a slight delay when the hard drive spins up, but that's not a problem for me. If there are any problems, I will update this review, but so far I am quite satisfied. ADDITIONAL: I've been using this device for almost a year and it works great. Period. Well, there's an irritant, but it doesn't affect performance in any way. The lower element of the row of status LEDs on the front sometimes flickers instead of being constantly on. However, it works fine on my 2008 iMac as a Time Machine backup drive. APPENDIX 2. It's been two years now and it's working fine. It was on all the time and doing hourly Time Machine backups. The only time it turned off was after a power outage and it always restarted with no issues.