Western Digital My Book Studio II 2TB Review (WDH2Q20000N)

I backup my PC on a regular basis, but I needed a backup solution for my newly purchased Macbook.  I thought it was  necessary after taking all my photos and music from my PC and loading them on to the Mac.  So after doing some research I decided to go with the Western Digital My Book Studio II.   I was debating on getting a NAS for the Mac but decided it wasn’t really necessary and to go along with that there really hasn’t been a Mac compatible NAS with stellar reviews.  All of them had some drawbacks.  So to save some money I went with the Western Digital; which is Mac and PC compatible. If you are a Windows user looking for a NAS read this post on my favorite NAS.

In terms of price I picked it up for $255.99 from J&R and at the time of this writing that still seems to be the best price.  For 2TB’s (2 x 1TB) of storage I thought it was a great deal, as it turns out to be under 13 cents a GB.

On to the review….

What’s in the Box?

The packaging was very good. It came wrapped in a hard plastic protector so even if you’re having this shipped you shouldn’t be too worried about the hard drive being damaged. The drive comes with an installation CD (equipped with both the Windows and Mac Install), Power Cord, Instructions, Firewire 800-400, Firewire 800 and USB 2.0 cable. I was happy that the drive came with all of the cables, but I was a little upset with the length of each of the them. I would say the Firewire and USB wires were only about 3 feet in length. So if you have plans to have the drive more than 3ft away from your computer you will have to invest in either a whole new cable or buy an extension.

Features

Serial Transfer Rate

• FireWire 800 Serial Bus Transfer Rate (1394b) of 800 Mb/s (Max)
• eSATA Serial Bus Transfer Rate (eSATA) of 3 Gb/s (Max)
• FireWire 400 Serial Bus Transfer Rate (1394a) of 400 Mb/s (Max)
• USB 2.0 Serial Bus Transfer Rate (USB 2.0) of 480 Mb/s (Max)

Physical Specifications

• Capacity 2 TB
• Interface Quad Interface

User Serviceable

• Want to upgrade a drive? Simply open the case and replace the existing drive – no screwdriver needed.

Capacity Gauge

• See at a glance how much space is available on your storage system from the lights on the front of the drive.

System Requirements

• Available USB port, FireWire 800 or 400 port, eSATA port or eSATA adapter card
• Mac OS X 10.4.10+, 10.5.2+
• Windows 2000/XP/Vista

Appearance

The drive is one of the better looking drives I have seen. It has the exact same finish as the aluminum finished Macbook’s so they blend well together. The drive is also fairly small in size with dimensions of 3.87(W) x 6.54(H) x 6.06(L) and weighs 5.2 pounds.

Installation

I ran the setup on the Mac in about 2 minutes. The Western Digital software appears in the header bar next to Airport Utility and the Time. When you enter the drive manager it gives the option as to whether you want to run the drive as RAID 1 or RAID 0 and have data in HFS+ (for Mac) or FAT32 (for Windows). The drive comes pre-configured for Mac (HFS+) so if you are running Windows it may take some additional time to re-format the drive to FAT32. If you need an explanation of RAID 1 and RAID 0 you can see my previous post on backups here. This is something you need to decide on prior to adding any data because if you decide to change it down the road you will have to delete all the data to reformat to whatever RAID you select. Because I want redundant data in case of drive failure I went with the RAID 1 setup. This also takes under 2 minutes after you make your selection. Now it’s time to backup data!

Backing Up

Since I am using a Mac I will be using the Time Machine application. Depending on your setup you may want to partition your drive so that you can have one part strictly for backups and another for storage. I decided to break the drive up into two equal partitions; having one strictly for Time Machine. For Mac users, I strongly recommend this because Time Machine uses whatever space you give it; so if you don’t partition, Time Machine will eventually eat up all 2 TB (or 1 TB, if you are setup using RAID 1). That most likely would not happen for a very long time, but to save you a problem down the road it’s easy to partition the drive up front. Again, this is something you can’t (easily) change down the road without deleting all the data so you will want to decide this before you backup anything. Once you have the drives partitioned backups pretty much run themselves with Time Machine. For storage it’s drag and drop. Unfortunately my speeds aren’t great but I am using USB 2.0 since the new Macbook’s don’t have Firewire (grrrrr!!). If one of the drive does fail it is really simple to swap out drives. You just pop off the top cover and pull out the drive; no special tools required.

Final Thoughts

Weaknesses
The only drawback for me is the length of the included USB and Firewire cables.

Strengths
For a 2TB (also available in 1TB) hard drive with RAID 1 capabilities this is a great buy. The appearance and the ease of use is also a major plus. If you’re in the market for a hard drive I would give this drive a serious look. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to leave a comment.