In April this year, we tested a large number of hard drives. In the category of external desktop drives, the 2 TB WD My Book Studio Edition II 4TB was pretty good. We now have with us the WD My Book Studio Edition II 4TB Hard Drive.
This is a huge drive mind you – it weighs around 2.63 kg, so it’s not ideal to carry very often. Four connectivity options are available – Firewire 800, Firewire 400, USB & eSATA.
WD My Book Studio Edition II 4TB
The specialty of this drive is that it supports RAID-O & RAID-1. RAID-O makes the entire 4TB usable. We haven’t seen too many drives that require drives, but this one does for the RAID function. When you first connect it, you need to install the driver & then set the RAID configuration.
There was nothing spectacular with the test results. The read burst speed was higher with the RAID- I configuration with both connection interfaces – USB & firewire. With our file transfer tests, We found that average read and write speeds to be similar with both RAID configurations. the 1 GB Photoshop scratch test showed a big difference in file transfer. With RAID-O, the speed was twice as good as raid-1, as you would expect. With Firewire, the performance was around 10% better than with USB.
The 4TB WD My Book Studio Edition II only works with Windows vista due to capacity restrictions of previous Windows operating systems. Using RAID-O is recommended, but if your data is very important, RAID-1 is the way to go. At $649.99, it surely is a costly thing to buy, therefor, we’d suggest our readers to wait until the price drops.
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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.