WD intros 4TB My Book Studio Edition II external hard drive
By Darren Murph 
posted Jun 9th 2009 10:46AM
posted Jun 9th 2009 10:46AM
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That would hold a lotta videos... family videos.
Only to lose them all to one HD failure.
"family videos" and "nature videos, not for children."
seen many of those folders on external drives at my clients.
Family videos?
YOU'RE SICK YOU KNOW THAT
Well according to Mr. Internet : Incest is the least thing family can do together.
"Only to lose them all to one HD failure. "
Use them in RAID 1 then, moron.
dude say your money and get a date
Yep, similar to what happened to us, twice. We've had WD external MyBook drives in the past. The first one, after about 2 years, crashed and everything was lost. Fool me, I bought a replacement (with an even bigger hard drive!), which crashed after about 6 months. Luckily this one was just backup copies of our laptops. No help from WD at all in either case. We've moved on to jungledisk.com (an interface to Amazon's awesome S3 on-line storage) and haven't looked back. It's cheap too, about $6 a month for about 25GB of data stored there (encrypted of course). No more drive worries for us!
I use Jungledisk as well. One thing Eddie didn't mention is that I can access my files from anywhere using a web browser. Since we can't use thumbdrives in my office, it's very easy for me to copy files from my home computer, up to the network, then copy them down in the office.
Too expensive, 1tb HDs are £60 each, does not compute.
yeah, i just bought a 1TB external for $90.
and 2TB drives (of which this uses 2) are $250 each.
see here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136344
so in essence you're getting a raid controller, esata controller (with port multiplier), the firewire and usb controllers and everything else for $150.00
seems to computer quite easily.
Raid 0 is all fun and games until someone loses 4TB worth of Movies, Music, Pictures, and Porn.
Haha, yeah...This makes no sense at all except for milking money out of idiots and corporate bragging rights.
Screw the movies, music and pictures. All we care about is porn!
No doubt the reason it's setup as RAID 0 is not for the speed increase, but to present to the operating system a single 4TB disk.
My 1TB MyBook Studio is the worst external drive I've ever used. I'm forced to use it with USB instead of FW800 (the whole reason I bought it) because it hangs Leopard all the time. Multiple driver updates, firmware updates, and the drive manager software still haven't fixed it.
Much better idea to grab an empty dual FW800 enclosure from someone (I have my eyes on the OWC dual drive one) and put in your own drives.
You mean using USB will fix that? I assumed it was the drive spinning up...
Well if I'd be you, I'd get that fixed. Mine works no problem on my MBP with FW 800 (worked flawlessly on my MB with FW 400 as well).
And therein is the dilemma with these bigger-is-better drives. I have a 1.2 TB HP Media Vault that is loaded with my legally owned DVD movies and still digital pictures. I do backup my stills but given the storage requirements and time to backup that amount of video data, I have accepted the fact that when these drives go tango uniform I will have to rebuild the entire video library from scratch. At least I have a directory listing and the source DVDs so that I know what is there.
that's why you use raid 1 or raid 5
1 of my 1.5tb drives died Thursday, got the replacement drive Monday and by this morning the array was rebuilt with out lost of data or even loss of access to the data.
Raid 0 is quite possibly the worst of all the options for something like this.
So much pron!
actually, I think enz1ey was a tad more subtle...
I'd hit it.
That would make a awesome Heater for the winter .. I have a 1 TB and its a little furnace
"4TB HDD should be enough for anyone" -y3knik
Um Nope ... Blu ray Backups are about 30 GB Ea ... Fill up fast
"Nobody will ever use more than 640k of RAM."
I'd so do anything to get 4TB into my laptop... SSD of course...
Leopards do hang? This makes it none better than windows. Maybe Snow-Leopard update will fix this problem
/sarcasm
for 30$ that's not a bad deal except it's only installable on a mac...
Sweet !
so the retail costs would be 240 dollars worth of drives (or so), a 20 dollar RAID card, and some plastic? Maybe 300...even 400 would be a OK price....but seriously 650? Must cost WD 250 dollars to put the "Mac Compatible" sticker on the box.
You never know, That may be the apple tax! :D
hmmm
dual drive configuration per the summary.
so where can i buy these 2TB single drives for $120.
I'll take 16.
i'd like a 4 tb ssd...call me when THATS out for about 6-7 hundred bucks
then i wont have to worry much about losing my 4 tb of family videos and nature videos and what have you :P
So who wants to translate the morse code on the back of that case? :)
It would be funny if some engineer wrote curse words or something geeky like "resistance is futile" there.
You touch the point ;) I was exactly thinking the same. And can someone explain why some dots bleeds over the metal fold? Curious design.
Tough to say, because of the erratic spacing between the dots and dashes making it hard to judge where letters are separated. I tried the first few lines and it came out as "Ttseaeetjieaiteaeemejunyeiinenupenrwee", so either I'm doing it way wrong or they missed a golden opportunity here.
That is one fat bastard!
I'd like an ethernet port for that capacity... maybe even wireless.
problem is that you'd have to put a pretty beefy arm processor or higher and a decent amount of RAM to even approach eSata / FW800 speeds via ethernet.
Most of the "gigabit" ethernet connected network drives can't match USB 2.0 speeds....
i can barely exceed 19MB/s on a Maxtor network drive that features a gigabit controller, yet my eSata drive can hit 55MB/s.
If you are looking to lose all your data as soon as the warranty expires, go with this product line.
These things are crap, get a real NAS and backup correctly.
Lame.
You could buy a nice Drobo for that price. These ready-to-run "NAS" solutions are often not user-serviceable and you void the warranty if you open the case to recover your data in case of non-HD hardware failure. I purchased Buffalo Duo 1TB raid and now I'm counting the days until this thing fails because of commodity components inside of it.
While Drobo isn't stellar and also not truly a NAS, it's at least super-automated and gives you the option of picking your own drives and then changing them as situation warrants.
wow...little over priced? I thought drives of that size didn't like Raid setups.
I don't think I'd have two 2TB disks in RAID 0... unless I was doing some very serious filesharing. Could be put to much better use.
I would much prefer a Drobo to this. This is a great deal, sure, and more storage than most would ever need- but I wouldn't have the feeling of security, or the ability to expand should I ever want to, I have with Drobo.
This is great for backing up my 4TB WHS box, actually....
This isn't designed to run in RAID 0 imo. I have a 2TB version of this, and run it basically as a 1TB drive with built in raid 1. It handles all the mirroring internally, will warn you of a drive failure, and let you swap the drives out yourself without voiding warranty.
I was manually backing up my data across two external HDDs, and this is a way neater solution. That price is because of the 2TB drives in it.
Yes, the drobo is a nice piece of kit, but these things are just plug and play and a nice robust alternative to a standard large drive. A drobo was (until very recently) $500 with no drives. Add in the premium for 2TB drives and that soon adds up.
This is a BAD IDEA, unless you need very fast sequential write speed on an external disc.
If you want large-capacity *reliable* storage for backup and media purposes, get a NAS unit (preferably eSATA or firewire) that can support 3 (or more) 3.5" drives and has *hardware* RAID5. The total usable capacity will be equal to the capacity of two drives.
So 3x 2TB drives will get you 4TB of usable space. or 3X 1.5GB drives = 3TB usable space.
RAID5 is a great option for this type of home backup/media use because:
1) Because it generates and stores parity data distributed among the drives, It provides the ability to suffer a total drive failure in 1 out of the 3 drives *without losing any data*. All you do is swap in a new drive and you'll be 100% back to normal after the system regenerates the missing files from the parity data.
2) RAID5 provides 2/3 of the total disc array capacity as usable space, whereas RAID1 aka mirrored mode only gives you 1/2 as usable space.
3) Because data is "striped" across all the disks, RAID5 provides blazing fast read speeds similar to RAID0.
4) The only penalty for using RAID5 is slower data writes because after each write, the disk controller has to calculate and store the parity information. But this isn't a significant issue if you are using the drive array as a large capacity backup and/or media storage.
Well loosely_coupled, What is the best and most reasonable priced solution that fits your requirements?
you aren't going to get something with true hardware raid for less than $300 for the raid controller itself.
anything less is a quaasi software raid with raid controller and will require cpu cycles to run it.
not that that is a bad thing, but it is a drawback.
true hardware RAID cards have on board processors and should also have a built in battery backup to allow for completion of write cycles in the event of power failure.
not something you pick up for $50 or even $100.
so yes, you can get some really expensive NAs, or you can just build a cheap computer to do the same thing and have much more storage capacity and with a true hardware raid card have the option for on the fly expansion of the array and utilize real gigabit speeds.
however, you'll also have the power bill to go along with it.
I've got several DAS, NAS, and even a SAN in my corporate network. they all server different purposes.
and to those worried about drive failure, even on RAID 0, most people aren't experiencing drive failure before they simply replace the device due to needing more storage.
this will of course not always hold true, but it is the majority.
and USB drives aren't meant to run all the time anyway, they are meant to be turned off.
if you want one that runs all the time, get one with a good fan in it because heat is what kills your external drives.
especially the ones in these nice insulating plastic cases, so get an aluminum case instead.
*shakes head* I have real problems with the size of these drivers. Its one thing back when you have 500GB of storage that wasn't RAID 1. If the drive went bad you would loose a metric ton of stuff. But at 4TB of storage I think its borderline mandatory that such things be mirrored. And yes I know that to do it on a 4TB drive you would need 4 drives instead of two. But think about it. Devices like this, in many cases, wouldn't fill up for years. So redundancy is borderline mandatory. IMHO I personally would get two of these and use robocopy once a quarter to sync the two then drop one in a safety deposit box.
you'd be surprised how fast these devices fill up.
even legally.
let alone illegally.
I ripped my entire DVD collection that runs around 500 movies into less then 2TB of storage. As external storage its not like I would be installing games and apps on the thing either. I have a Canon 40D and even RAW I only fill up maybe 1GB per month and a half. And while I do download "stuff" of ob BT to fill up a 4TB drive I would have to be downloading crap I don't even want to watch or listen to...to fill up such a drive.
It has a button on it. Does that mean it doesn't power on and off automatically with the computer like my two MyBook 1TB Essentials do? That would suck. Power outtages mean you have to turn everything back on manually. I hate that!
False advertising, the customer is not getting 4TB of storage space.
I have a single terabyte drive that comes in as 918GB (NTFS-Defaults). If I were to apply that to a 2TB, of which, I have none, that would give me 1836GB of space. Times two, we are shy 328GB from the advertised limit. This is not like a 10GB HDD, which was shy 90 lousy megabytes, but a whole drive's worth of 328GB or more.
Nah... All set...
This time next year, 4 TB will be a standard external HD available to everyone at a very reasonable price. Win 7 will be the driving force!
worrying about losing data but not doing backups seems rather stupid