WD intros 4TB My Book Studio Edition II external hard drive

What a difference a year makes, right? Right around 12 months after Western Digital outed its 2TB My Book Studio Edition II, the company has come forward with a new edition that houses twice the storage. The dual-drive device includes a pair of those minty fresh 2TB HDDs arranged in a RAID 0 configuration, and WD promises that it'll play nice with both Macs and PCs. As for connectivity, you'll get eSATA, FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and USB 2.0, and the handy capacity gauge does exactly what it says. It's up for order right now for $649.99.

[enz1ey @ Jun 9th 2009 10:49AM]

That would hold a lotta videos... family videos.

[Smoke_me_a_Kipper @ Jun 9th 2009 11:02AM]

Only to lose them all to one HD failure.

[ImPulsE @ Jun 9th 2009 11:08AM]

"family videos" and "nature videos, not for children."

seen many of those folders on external drives at my clients.

[BAWWW @ Jun 9th 2009 11:08AM]

Family videos?
YOU'RE SICK YOU KNOW THAT

[ImPulsE @ Jun 9th 2009 11:37AM]

Well according to Mr. Internet : Incest is the least thing family can do together.

[G. I. @ Jun 9th 2009 12:14PM]

"Only to lose them all to one HD failure. "

Use them in RAID 1 then, moron.

[thedankone @ Jun 9th 2009 12:24PM]

dude say your money and get a date

[Eddie @ Jun 10th 2009 1:41PM]

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!

[Connie @ Jun 10th 2009 2:48PM]

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.

[Tommo @ Jun 9th 2009 10:50AM]

Too expensive, 1tb HDs are £60 each, does not compute.

[tingrin87 @ Jun 9th 2009 12:54PM]

yeah, i just bought a 1TB external for $90.

[mikeg @ Jun 9th 2009 5:05PM]

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.

[Erb @ Jun 9th 2009 10:55AM]

Raid 0 is all fun and games until someone loses 4TB worth of Movies, Music, Pictures, and Porn.

[Amrosorma @ Jun 9th 2009 11:05AM]

Haha, yeah...This makes no sense at all except for milking money out of idiots and corporate bragging rights.

[Patriks7 @ Jun 9th 2009 12:41PM]

Screw the movies, music and pictures. All we care about is porn!

[flying chair consultant @ Jun 10th 2009 11:14AM]

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.

[warwick5s @ Jun 9th 2009 10:59AM]

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.

[scooterbaga @ Jun 9th 2009 12:29PM]

You mean using USB will fix that? I assumed it was the drive spinning up...

[Patriks7 @ Jun 9th 2009 12:41PM]

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).

[V35_Pilot @ Jun 9th 2009 11:01AM]

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.

[mharrman @ Jun 9th 2009 11:11AM]

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.

[Kinger @ Jun 9th 2009 11:03AM]

So much pron!

[Kinger @ Jun 9th 2009 11:06AM]

actually, I think enz1ey was a tad more subtle...

[TomServo @ Jun 9th 2009 11:04AM]

I'd hit it.

[Jon @ Jun 9th 2009 11:06AM]

That would make a awesome Heater for the winter .. I have a 1 TB and its a little furnace

[y3k.nik @ Jun 9th 2009 11:08AM]

"4TB HDD should be enough for anyone" -y3knik

[Jon @ Jun 9th 2009 11:21AM]

Um Nope ... Blu ray Backups are about 30 GB Ea ... Fill up fast

[Backlin @ Jun 9th 2009 12:31PM]

"Nobody will ever use more than 640k of RAM."

[Patriks7 @ Jun 9th 2009 12:43PM]

I'd so do anything to get 4TB into my laptop... SSD of course...

[ImPulsE @ Jun 9th 2009 11:10AM]

Leopards do hang? This makes it none better than windows. Maybe Snow-Leopard update will fix this problem

/sarcasm

[xconan @ Jun 9th 2009 8:52PM]

for 30$ that's not a bad deal except it's only installable on a mac...

[ihackintosh @ Jun 9th 2009 11:11AM]

Sweet !

[dan2600 @ Jun 9th 2009 11:11AM]

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.

[Erb @ Jun 9th 2009 11:36AM]

You never know, That may be the apple tax! :D

[mikeg @ Jun 9th 2009 5:07PM]

hmmm
dual drive configuration per the summary.

so where can i buy these 2TB single drives for $120.

I'll take 16.

[TRS @ Jun 9th 2009 11:11AM]

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

[loadstar @ Jun 9th 2009 11:15AM]

So who wants to translate the morse code on the back of that case? :)

[Maxfli82 @ Jun 9th 2009 11:26AM]

It would be funny if some engineer wrote curse words or something geeky like "resistance is futile" there.

[nicleT @ Jun 9th 2009 2:26PM]

You touch the point ;) I was exactly thinking the same. And can someone explain why some dots bleeds over the metal fold? Curious design.

[Shunnabunich @ Jun 10th 2009 1:01AM]

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.

[Galley @ Jun 9th 2009 11:19AM]

That is one fat bastard!

[Beastage @ Jun 9th 2009 11:19AM]

I'd like an ethernet port for that capacity... maybe even wireless.

[mikeg @ Jun 9th 2009 5:10PM]

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.

[Dan Gerson @ Jun 9th 2009 11:56AM]

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.

[zamboni @ Jun 9th 2009 12:17PM]

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.

[thedankone @ Jun 9th 2009 12:24PM]

wow...little over priced? I thought drives of that size didn't like Raid setups.

[tobz1000 @ Jun 9th 2009 12:21PM]

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.

[nickux @ Jun 9th 2009 12:27PM]

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.

[Russell @ Jun 9th 2009 2:00PM]

This is great for backing up my 4TB WHS box, actually....

[mrklaw @ Jun 9th 2009 2:05PM]

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.