Western Digital My Book series bumped to 2TB

Western Digital's extremely popular My Book series of external hard drives got a little capacity boost today: all the single disk models now max out at 2TB. Not bad for the $330 - $380 you'll spend depending on port configuration, but that's a lot of data to trust to one disk -- we'd have a backup strategy firmly in place before plunking down the green.

[Via Electronista]

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 25th 2009 9:41PM]

Twice the Tuberculosis! Yeah!

[LiQuiDFuSioN Posted Mar 25th 2009 9:44PM]

2TB, finally. I just may have to pick one up soon. Tired of having all these 1TB lying around.

Now 3TB or 4TB would be even better.

[ZaxCG2 Posted Mar 25th 2009 10:39PM]

Someone's downloading a whole lot of SOMETHING.

Or you could just be a video editor.

I will say no more...

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 25th 2009 10:44PM]

Glad you stopped while you were ahead turtle boy..

Im gonna need a few of deez for all my ultra high res family photos

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 25th 2009 9:45PM]

Bestbuy seems to have this drive already for $300 for the usb only version. They also have a new seagate 1.5tb that they just got in as well for $150.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=9238265&type=product&id=1218065493311

Can someone help me decide between the two? I know the old seagates had a bad rep, but perhaps this one has the new 700.12 internal drive. It doesn't have any info on the seagate site and there are no reviews so far.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 25th 2009 9:52PM]

yeah, and im stuck with a 40 gig harddrive with 20 left

[reddyroc Posted Mar 25th 2009 10:00PM]

i have the 500GB version of the mybook and its great. i plan on picking up another one and i might just consider this 2TB. i love the fast firewire cnx too.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 25th 2009 10:01PM]

2TB over USB? Haha..no thanks

[Funke Tobias Dr Posted Mar 25th 2009 10:03PM]

I recently got the 1TB WD Essentials (USB 2.0) drive from Newegg, and it's superb. It's also a lot slimmer than this form factor, if USB is all you need.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 25th 2009 10:05PM]

I'll just buy two 1 TB drives for $100 less.

[tavisjohn Posted Mar 25th 2009 10:06PM]

My 2 250 gig ones are working just fine. I did have 2 1tb ones burn them selves out. And a 500gig one burn itself too. (There were scorch marks on the HD itself, and the black paint was bubbled)

So I do not trust WD's MyBook drives anymore. I have replaced them with RAID0 boxes, so if a drive fails, I still have my data.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 25th 2009 10:13PM]

Mybook drives in the past were pretty bad and didn't have enough cooling. Now they seem to have more ventilation for better cooling. The first (old) Mybook drive died within 6 months due to clicking.

I take it you mean Raid 1 and not Raid 0 right?

Right now I have 2 1TB Western Digital "Black" drives in Raid 1 and two external cheap drives to back up that data on another raid 1 setup. It's a bit overboard, but i'm weird. Overall it wasn't too expensive and worth it.

Can't wait until motherboards have more than 4 internal SATA ports standard.

[tavisjohn Posted Mar 25th 2009 10:47PM]

It could be Raid1... I keep getting them confused. lol

The sad thing is the oldest of the MyBooks I have are fine. After my 500gig one died, I put fans on all my drives... And they STILL died!!!

Between that, and the fact that the MyBook drives are "Sealed" so you can't really just swap out a drive...

I'll stick to my external RAID boxes that auto mirror the drives. That way if a drive fails, I just power it off, swap out the drive, and turn it back on. It will automaticaly rebuild the mirror for me.
It may be more expensive up front, but my data is safer, and in the long run it will make my life easier.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 25th 2009 11:44PM]

I just had a 500GB MyBook Studio drive burn out after ~18 months. Unfortunately, it was the only backup for most of my data. In the future, I'm going with a RAID 1 setup. Lesson learned.

[tavisjohn Posted Mar 26th 2009 12:08AM]

Yea, all of my external drives will soon be Raid1.
And I will have mirroring software running to mirror my laptop's internal drives to an external backup drive.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 25th 2009 10:08PM]

Does anyone notice how eSATA with a Mybook external is painfully slow? I swear that I couldn't get over 63MB/sec read so I had to return it.

I went with a Fantom eSATA external. It was dirt cheap and made of alumin(i)um and inside is a Western Digital "Green" 1TB drive.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 25th 2009 10:23PM]

Aluminium. You spelt it right.

[FNG Posted Mar 25th 2009 10:32PM]

firefox with built in spell check FTW

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 25th 2009 10:44PM]

aluminum for yanks
aluminium for brits

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 26th 2009 12:01AM]

63mb/s is the average read speed for the AACS drives. (The 1st Gen WD "Green" drives)

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 26th 2009 2:18AM]

"aluminum for yanks
aluminium for brits"

More like aluminum for the americans who have to be different in every way possible (they tried it with the economy ...)
And aluminium for the rest of the world.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 25th 2009 10:09PM]

So when are they going to upgrade their damn My DVR Expander. It's still stuck at 500GB for over $100.

[maveric101 Posted Mar 26th 2009 12:05AM]

i thought you could actually use any external drive with DVR's, assuming they were formatted with the right file system. maybe i'm wrong.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 26th 2009 1:04AM]

Using USB2.0 instead of say eSATA on this thing would be insanity. I can't imagine what it would be like to wait for 50GB files to be transferred over USB2.0...*shudder*

[DRHouse Posted Mar 26th 2009 2:49AM]

Its not that bad USB2 transfer 60GBin like 1Hour~ (1GB/Min)~ (With E.sata its more like 20min only from my own Tests)
Its more than enough for a storage hard drive

However if you wanna use this drive for video editing/etc then E.sata is a must

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 25th 2009 10:57PM]

There is no way I'd ever trust one drive to store nearly 2 TB of data. So far 500 GB is as much as I'm willing to risk since I have a backup drive of 500 GB. I don't even want to think of losing a drive's worth of data. I use TechTool Pro to keep backup directories of my critical data, use SMART drive monitoring, temperature monitoring and I even partition my drives so a whole drive won't become corrupted at one time in the event of a directory scramble. I do weekly clones of all my OSs. 1 TB is just too scary to think of, but 2 TBs is insane.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 25th 2009 11:15PM]

I intend to get one of these with eSATA to extend my DVR. Or I could just get the drive and pop it into an enclosure that I already have with eSATA cabling. I'll get watever turns out cheaper and pray it works.

[adachan Posted Mar 25th 2009 11:37PM]

These work great with Windows Home Server -- what other backup solution do you need?

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 26th 2009 1:46AM]

My WD Book 1TB lost a lot of credibility for me recently - trying a last minute backup (taking hours) of my Vista system after I got the disk error warning on my 80GB a copy of the C: drive ended up with nothing but unreadable folders which couldn't be deleted hence wasted disk space. For my WD Book to even have a way to be trashed by Microsoft leaves me unhappy with the technology. But both the IDE C: and the USB book failing at once pretty much proved to me that Microsoft is still playing its "get the customer" games which I first encountered with the PC Junior when a memory upgrade triggered a file delete program. Where's a good place to tell my story about Microsoft's Virus?

[DRHouse Posted Mar 26th 2009 2:46AM]

AVOID the seagate 1.5T HD I'm disappointment with this hard drive, it have too many problems
The WD 1.5T HD is much much better however its slower than the seagate unreliable drive
Right only 1 manufacture makes the 2Terra HD (Western digital) so its gonna be overpriced for a while
Seagate will launch there 2Terra HD (And samsung) around July with 7200RPM speed

Current WD 2terra HD spin in 2 Speeds to keep its heat low (Between 5400 and 7200RPM) however the HD has proven to be reliable hard drive

Best time to buy your hard drives is in july 2009 , its going to cost 199$ and stable 7200rpm speed

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 26th 2009 5:32AM]

I've got the 1TB version; it's a slow piece of crap.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 26th 2009 5:33AM]

I spent weeks trying to get it to work with firewire on windows, it never did. Many people reported similar problems with no solution.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 26th 2009 5:32AM]

I spent weeks trying to get the firewire connection to work with windows. never did.

[DRHouse Posted Mar 26th 2009 7:36AM]

If you use Windows Vista Firewire will properly never work in the first place
Firewire got messed up in windows vista (After the release of service pack 1) hopefully microsoft will fix that with SP2
They released a 3 patches to fix it after SP1 however its still not working well as it suppose to

[scooterbaga Posted Mar 26th 2009 11:15AM]

"...have a backup strategy firmly in place before plunking down the green."


Shit... what if this IS the backup strategy?

[GingerFox Posted Mar 26th 2009 1:13PM]

back up the back up! lol

[senseless1707 Posted Mar 26th 2009 1:04PM]

Now this would be nice to have, my 500GB is just to small...

[me2 Posted Mar 26th 2009 3:35PM]

Are these the ones with the e-SATA connector? If so I hope they fixed the hole that the connector is supposed to go into. After numerous tries to get it to work with brand new cables I realized the connections weren't really connecting. I had to get a hot butter knife and "make" the hole larger and now the connectors conect and works like a charm. That was really poor design WD!

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 27th 2009 2:09AM]

Yes, they come with eSATA/1394B [silver]1394A[black]/USB 2.0

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 26th 2009 5:20PM]

2TB could be a bit better then my 250gb...

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 27th 2009 1:38PM]

will wait till they come down to about $200. new egg has 1tb externals for $95 all the time. they prob will be $200 by christmas then I will use all my 1tb as master back up and the 2tb for my wdtv staying away from the 1.5 all together

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 27th 2009 1:47PM]

1 year warranty guess these drive makers arent to confident about there newer drives even seagate went from 5 to 2 oh well anyone know cant wait till blank blu ray discs drop below $5 thats my back up plan dvd-rs and dl just are to small but they have to do