Western Digital displays its soft side with MyBook line of drives

Hard drive manufacturer Western Digital seems to be having something of an identity crisis lately, switching between a "dangerous" mystique with products like the Raptor and Scorpion, and a more dignified, family-friendly persona with the Caviar and now the MyBook series of drives. Literally shaped like a fat tome, the new drive draws its design cues from "in-depth consumer research," which probably indicated that people don't care to associate their computer peripherals with deadly animals past and present. These same consumers also must have told WD engineers that they want plug-and-play capability (no CDs required for install, check), easy-to-use file maintenance software and capacity indicators (also check), and finally, a heat dissipation system disguised as book page ends (checkmate). Drives that the whole family can agree on are available immediately, and range from $150 for the 160GB Essentials edition (USB 2.0) to $329 for the 500GB Premium version (Firewire 400).

[Via Yahoo!]

[LordIcarus @ Mar 9th 2006 9:31AM]

This is absolutely beautiful. It's too bad the price per gig is indirectly proportional to the capacity of the drives though.

[Al Scagnetti @ Mar 9th 2006 9:46AM]

Nice. They went to all the trouble to make it look like a book, and then put a huge, glowing button on the binder. Wouldn't the point of making it look like a book be to....make it look like a book?

[Raider @ Mar 9th 2006 9:49AM]

Interesting if your computer set up is next to a book shelf.

[Whiplash @ Mar 9th 2006 9:58AM]

My wife will love this. She's so sick of my ugly ass computer equipment covering up her expensive countertop in the kitchen/family room. Still doesn't solve the cabling problem though.... hmmmmm.....

[James Varghese @ Mar 9th 2006 9:59AM]

The 160 GB ones are actually on sale at Best Buy for $99 in case anyone is interested.

[Ryan Gardner @ Mar 9th 2006 10:10AM]

The best thing about it is - it's Western Digital... meaning you can get a new book every six to nine months when your old book crashes on you destroying all of your data... You'll never get sick of any one case...

[kenny @ Mar 9th 2006 10:30AM]

I hate to be the one to have that book thrown at them...

[wim @ Mar 9th 2006 10:56AM]

Almost perfect, if they would make these daisy chainable with firewire and connectable to the home network over CAT5 cabling, this would blend in nicely on the living room bookshelf, you would not even notice it's there, and all your knowledge would reside on the same place!

[Warren @ Mar 9th 2006 11:39AM]

I could see the retisence towards liking a Scorpion, but Raptors are cool - I thought everybody liked hawks, falcons, and such.

[DrHockey @ Mar 9th 2006 12:20PM]

Bought the 160GB last week at Best Buy - working like a charm as a backup drive. It also comes with rubber sticky pads if you want to lay the "book" flat.

[Heyzeus @ Mar 9th 2006 12:32PM]

When's the Bible edition coming out?

[Jimmy C @ Mar 9th 2006 12:43PM]

Is anyone else sick of the "My" motif? It feels so -- 1995. Even MS is getting rid of it.

[Scottieboy @ Mar 9th 2006 12:54PM]

the 250gb one is daisy chainable through firewire and also has usb. My friend also has one and to told me (i haven't seen this my self though) that he could install a program on it on one computer and use that program on another computer.

[glacia00 @ Mar 9th 2006 12:59PM]

The biggest problem for me is how unreliable external hard drives are in general. While they're intended for backup they are a very poor solution.

Heatsinks work very poorly with low temperature differential. In other words, no moving air no heat transfer. No fan no cooling. No cooling dead drive. They are data time-bombs.

[glacia00 @ Mar 9th 2006 1:30PM]

12. Is anyone else sick of the "My" motif? It feels so -- 1995. Even MS is getting rid of it.

Not as sick as the "I" motif. Although I never liked it I haven't seen many 'My's.

Who's up for a vote on what jargon this generation will be embarassed by in a few year. Mine are still 'Blog' and 'Podcast'.

[Dennis @ Mar 9th 2006 2:42PM]

Looks like the same drive TiVo was showing at CES attached as expansion for the Series 3 High Def TiVo:

http://www.megazone.org/Photos/CES2006/TiVo/SMALL/Series3-front-1.JPG
http://www.megazone.org/Photos/CES2006/TiVo/SMALL/SATA-front-1.JPG

[Joel @ Mar 14th 2006 11:20PM]

Want a hertz donut?

[David @ Nov 18th 2007 8:50PM]

MyBook 500GB USB failed me big time. It worked fine for awhile and I was using it for a backup device..bad decision for me. My Hard Drive Crashed and when I went to recover my data, "My Computer" would not show "MyBook" as being there even though it showed up as a USB device connected to my PC. I tried connecting to 3 of my computers at home and the same problem arose.

David