Western Digital My Book Pro Edition II Review

Western Digital My Book Pro Edition II detailed review

The terabyte era has begun!

Western Digital sent us something we’ve never seen, a humongous external drive with—hold your breaths—1 TB (1,000 GB) capacity. That much space is enough to store 75 hours of DV video, 120 hours of HD content, 400 hours of DVD or 2,00,000 MP3 songs.

This sturdily constructed drive has the looks of an extra-large reference book. The drive has a push-button on one side, which lets you take a one-touch backup of your data in conjunction with the provided Retrospect backup software. The button also serves as a capacity gauge.

The My Book Pro appears larger than an average external drive because inside are two WD 5000KS 7200 rpm hard drives, 500 GB each. These drives are configured so that you can either choose RAID mirroring for extra data protection or RAID striping for speed and performance. RAID configuration is easy with WD’s intuitive RAID Wizard.

The My Book sports a triple interface: USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and also the ultra-fast FireWire 800, which has a throughput of 800 MBps. The design of the drive is such that you can stack more such drives in a daisy-chain.

Drive performance, though not the best, was very good—as we had expected. It took just about 45 seconds to transfer a 1 GB sequential file to the drive and 34 to copy it back. Copying a GB to and fro simultaneously took just over a minute and a half.

The bundled Retrospect Express 6.1 backup software can handle all common data backup tasks such as synchronising, incremental, etc. You can schedule these tasks, and it can even do a complete restore of your system if things go terribly wrong. A convection-cooling system driven by a thermostatically-controlled fan keeps the setup cool. The My Book happens to be quite bulky, weighing in at 1.93 kg.

Even though it’s 1 TB, the Rs 27,450 price tag will take a toll on your bank balance.

Specifications
1 TB; 2xWD5000KS 7,200 rpm HDD; latency: 4.2 ms; read seek time: 8.9 ms; interfaces: USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and FireWire 800; cables: USB 2.0, IEEE 1394a/b; Dantz Retrospect Express 6.1 backup software; HxDxW: 174.6 mm x 159.3 mm x 104 mm; weight: 1.93 kg

Contact : Mediaman Infotech
Phone : 022-23823100
E-mail : santosh@mediamangroup.com
Web site : www.wdc.com
Price : Rs. 27,450