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Western Digital's My Book Studio Edition II: 6 TB of low-cost storage
It's a great time to be in the market for mass storage for your Mac. Hardware manufacturers keep coming out with new solutions that either provide more speed (like SSDs) or greater capacity, and the prices keep coming down. Western Digital is now shipping the My Book Studio Edition II, a two-drive enclosure filled with 6 TB (that's right, six terabytes) of RAID 0 storage and a quad-interface (FW800 / FW400 /eSata / USB2.0) for only US$549.99. That price is quite amazing, since the competing LaCie 4 Quadra array sells for almost $400 more. The My Book Studio Edition II takes advantage of WD's 3 TB Caviar Green drives, two of which are nestled into an enclosure. The product comes with a power adapter usable in the US, Canada and most European countries, FireWire 800 and USB cables, a FireWire 800/400 cable and a CD containing a user manual and a selection of software. The My Book Studio Edition II drive comes pre-formatted for Mac OS X and can be reformatted for use with Windows 7. While the array comes set up as a 6 TB RAID 0 stripe set, it's possible to use it as a mirrored pair (RAID 1) of 3 TB drives. For those who are looking for redundant storage, the RAID 1 solution makes a lot of sense. If it's raw storage capacity that you want, RAID 0 is the way you'll want to go -- just be sure to buy a second array for backup purposes. To see how the My Book Studio Edition II array stood up during our tests, turn to the next page. %Gallery-121290%
Western Digital's new My Book Studio Edition II has 6TB on offer, but no Thunderbolt or USB 3.0
If you want a lot of the GBs in not a lot of space, 3TB per disk is about as good as you're going to get. Western Digital has slapped two of its triple-terabyte monsters into a dual-disk enclosure and paired it with eSATA and FireWire 800 interfaces to create the My Book Studio Edition II. There's a good 'ol USB 2.0 hole in there as well, but no USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt for those getting hip with the new connections. Time Machine support is baked in as well as your choice of RAID configurations, all at a cost of $549.99. That's a good bit more than you'd spend if you bought a pair of disks and an empty enclosure, but such is the price of convenience. %Gallery-119224%
LaCie slams 3TB drives into d2 USB 3.0 and LaCie 2big USB 3.0, ups performance numbers
Do you have The Need? For Speed? Yeah, so do we, and it just so happens that LaCie does as well. Just weeks after the company properly introduced the "now shipping" status on its d2 USB 3.0 and 2big USB 3.0 drives, it has now expanded the options with a 6TB model. So far as we can tell, it looks as if the outfit placed a rather sizable order for those 3TB HDDs that were just unleashed by Western Digital, and it has tuned up the performance all the while. The 2big has reached 306MB/sec in the lab, representing a 20 percent speed boost over the prior models while making it "the fastest 2-bay RAID solution on the market." As for the d2? It can hum along at 156MB/sec with the inclusion of a 3TB hard drive. Both units are slated to hit retail next month, but asking prices are being kept under wraps for now.
Beyond Micro's 6TB Drivezilla Grande
4.5 terabytes of storage not enough for you? Well, data junkies, it looks like you can count on Beyond Micro to keep feeding your storage addiction, with the company recently beefing up its Drivezilla Grande tower to a ridiculously spacious 6TB. That mighty feat is accomplished by cramming eight 750GB 3.5-inch drives into the desktop-sized box which, by default, will show up as a single 6TB drive on your computer (at which point you'll likely need a tissue to wipe away the tears of joy). Those looking for RAID support, however, will be sorely disappointed, as will anyone hoping for a FireWire connection, with USB 2.0 the only interface option (rest assured, it is USB 1.1 compatible). What's more, if you find that 6TB isn't cutting it a few years down the line, you can just swap out a few drives and go for double digits, though there's no room to simply add additional drives. Terabytes don't come cheap, of course, especially six of 'em, with this Drivezilla also breaking another barrier: the $4,000 one.[Thanks, Justin W.]
