One Terabyte is a lot of hard drive space by anyone’s measurement, and with a number of external drives now hitting this magical number for less and less money, we decided to take a look at what Western Digital’s contribution to the market has to offer.

The model we’re looking at today is the Western Digital My Book Pro Edition II. At a glance this unit gives us 1TB of storage space from its 2 internal drives of 500GB each, 3 interfaces (USB2.0, Firewire400 and Firewire800) all wrapped in a silver plastic shell and retails for around AU$575. Not a bad price when you consider a 500GB internal desktop hard drive sells for around AU$240 on its own, so once you add two of them together you’re only paying around $95 for a double drive case with RAID capability, 3 interfaces and the included software, decent value in anyone’s books.

Appearance:

The casing of the My Book is made up of a single piece of silver plastic wrapped around the front and sides, mounted over a rather rigid but lightweight metal frame. The appearance of the unit is very minimalistic with only a single button on the front of the unit surrounded by two rings of LEDs to indicate power, activity and even how much space is being used on the drive, the only other markings are on the side of the drive with the Western Digital logo “WD” screen printed on each side. Overall it has a very ‘MAC G5’ appearance.

Western Digital 1TB My Book Pro Edition II

The top, back and base of the My Book is covered with perforated plastic to help ensure the internal drives are kept cool, this is coupled with a temperature controlled (and very quiet) fan which all in all keeps the whole unit quiet and reasonably cool. There is some heat out the top as you’d expect of something with two 3.5” desktop drives inside, but even after several hours of operation, it’s only warm to the touch, not hot at all.

There are no feet on the My Book, only a continuous strip of rubber that goes around the edges on the top, back and sides. Having this strip means the My Book can be stood up, laid down on its side, or put upside down and never move or get scratched, as the rubber strip will always be between the main drive and whatever surface you have it on. Quite a clever design.

Connectivity and installation:

The My Book Pro Edition II offers 3 different connection types, you can use either USB2.0, Firewire400 or Firewire800. These connection types mean the My Book is both Windows and MAC friendly, and no matter which connection type you use, installation is a real plug and play affair with no drivers required, for MAC users anyway, as the drive is preformatted for HSF+ (Journaled), a native MAC format. For Windows users they will need to repartition and format through Windows disk management tools before they can use it, this is all covered in the provided Quick Start guide though, so no-one should have any problems with installation.

Connections on Rear of Unit

Having both USB2.0 and Firewire connectivity options is a good thing and it provides excellent compatibility across almost all systems, MAC and PC alike, but with a drive of this size, something a little faster would have been a nice inclusion, such as eSATA, which is becoming more and more common on higher end systems these days, and let’s face it, what kind of system is a 1TB drive going to be hanging off? It’s more than likely going to be up there in terms of its specs and more often than not will have an eSATA connection. As eSATA can be almost 4x faster than even Firewire800, it would come in handy when you need to transfer/backup a few hundred gigs of ‘stuff’ on a regular basis.

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