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

Western Digital My Book Studio II - 6TB (2 x 3TB) USB 2.0/FireWire 800/400/eSATA External Desktop Hard Drive I bought this hard drive a few months ago and am just thrilled to have 3TB (mirror RAID-1) storage available. The drive came striped RAID 0, meaning the two drives were logically linked and presented to the Mac as a 6TB external drive. But after installing WD Drive Manager, I configured the drives to mirror each other, reducing capacity by 50% but increasing availability by 100%. To make this configuration change, the drive must be connected with a USB or Firewire cable. Cons: Any software or firmware updates for the drive will require a USB cable. You can control the drive via USB or Firewire. You CANNOT use the eSATA interface to manage the drive and WD Manager will not update automatically when using eSATA. WD Manager only works with USB and Firewire to monitor hard drive temperature and RAID status. However, this is not available when using an eSATA connection. I set up the drive on my 17" MacBook Pro (Lion) with ChronoSync to copy specific files from other external drives AND as a backup drive for Time Machine. ***WARNING*** Make sure you have updated drive firmware (v3.1.0.10) AND downloaded the latest drivers (WD Macintosh + TURBO Driver (10/2011)) AND WD Drive Manager (2.26b) and have installed. That's why I issued a warning. When I first bought the drive I connected it via eSATA to get the improved throughput. But after every backup I've made, when I disconnected and reconnected the drive, the Mac reported that the drive was read-only and wouldn't let me write any files until I repartitioned the drive! After the upgrade, this is it ***WARNING*** There seems to be a conflict between Drive Manager for My Book Studio II and WD Drive Manager for My Book Studio LX. I have a 1.5TB My Book Studio LX drive. (with LED front panel). When the WD Manager software was installed for this drive, it directly interfered with the Studio II WD Manager software and I lost the ability to monitor/manage the RAID status and drive temperature. I reinstalled WD Drive Manager for Studio II and lost control of the Studio LX drive and LCD interface. I'm going to use WD Manager for Studio II as LCD controls are not that important to me. But it's still a problem and Western Digital needs to fix it. So let me move on to other topics I've read about. I used Firewire 800 and eSATA drives to do a full backup of my Time Machine system with other programs running. Here's how it took a 249GB Time Machine backup from a 1TB drive: - USB 2.0, untested - Firewire, over 3 1/2 hours - eSATA, under 3 hours. For copying my iTunes purchases (1.1TB movies, music, podcasts, etc.): - USB 2.0, untested - Firewire, 3-1/2 hours - eSTAT, just under 3 hours heavy emphasis on "green" and its shutdown action. First, the drive never separated for me; it stays active and available all the time. I've never had a problem with -for actions timing out causing my drive to disconnect when I'm actively copying files. Just in case, I have my external firewire drive (1.4TB ) backed up twice via eSATA on the Studio Book II and never had any slowdown issues. Spin downs are relatively quick, typically less than 10 seconds. But if it's a spare drive, I don't care if it stops after 10 minutes of non-use. Whenever I've used it to store active files or large movies, the spinup time has seemed reasonable and not intrusive. However, I will admit that after a while it gets tiring to hear how often my drives spin up. Overall, I'm glad I bought this product. If you follow the two caveats I posted (update your drive firmware, driver software, and WD drive manager, and don't mix drive manager software), I think you'll be just as happy as I am. Disc. It's great to know that thanks to the capacity of this drive I have over a year (and counting) of Time Machine data. And it's really nice to know and use a second backup source.