Ordered 'My Book Studio Edition II, 2TB ed'

[redstar_dan]

So I have been after a new backup soloution for a while and I found that it is a messy ocean of devices out there. I am currently using a 1TB external drive, which has lasted me a long time, and I am worried its going to bite the dust.
I was really usnure if I should have chosen a NAS route or not. I finally pulled the trigger on the 'WD My Book Studio Edition II, 2TB Edition' and I am hoping it was the right move to make. It should arrive with me next week.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=210

I have both a MAC and PC setup, the My Book comes formated for Mac as standard and in Raid0 (I think). I will most probably re-format it for PC use and set it up for Raid1.

Has anybody got one of these devices? I did look at others like the Drobo. The WD seemed the best value for money and had some decent reviews.

I would be interested to hear if any one on ntsc-uk has dabbled with the My Book.

[egparadigm]

I have a My Book, not Studio, though. Had it about two years, maybe longer. No problems so far.

Why are you "worried its going to bite the dust"? As long as you have two copies of everything – one on the internal and one external – you should be fine.

[redstar_dan]

Cheers for the reply

Its mainly because I have had the drive for so long and I dont really know how long these things are supposed to last, Im worried its going to fail on me. I have a lot of data on it, its nearly full and I dont really like the idea of loosing all of that data from the drive.
I have got the most important bits and bobs backed up, on dvds and on my internal drives, so it wont be too bad when it happens.

[redstar_dan]

I thought I might add, I will be able to use the new drive on my mac, even though it will be formatted to NTFS. My current external drive (ntfs) originally did not work on my mac, as osx would not allow me to write to it...

I found two pieces of software to overcome this,
1.) http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/
2.) http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/

Everything works a treat currently, I dont see why an issue would appear on my mac with a different external drive.
I hope this might help someone

[Lyris]

I have a My Book Studio 1.5tb. I had to buy it because I was getting professional video tapes dumped to hard drive by a post house. The post house were Mac users so didn't have ESATA; I had to get a Firewire 800 drive and pay over the odds for the silly little connector.

Anyway, I thought it'd be OK, since I could get a 1.5tb to slot into my main machine and replace the drive inside the external shell with a 500gb one (which would do the job fine). No dice, the shell only accepts the hard drive that came inside it. So I have 1.5tb worth of storage stuck in there which would be of more use inside my main desktop.

If you just want a hard drive, it works fine, but I resent them locking it down like that.