Product Description

WD's My Book Premium Edition II dual-drive storage system offers RAID mirroring for extra data protection or RAID striping for extraordinary capacity and performance. Triple-interface and a powerful combination of features and performance make this system the storage solution of choice for creative professionals, workgroups, small offices and anyone looking for extra assurance that their data is safe.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29114 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Western Digital
• Model: WDG2T10000N
• Dimensions: 9.00" h x 9.00" w x 12.00" l, 7.60 pounds
• Memory: 0MB
• Hard Disk: 1000GB

Features

• Extraordinary capacity - With one terabyte (1,000 GB) of storage in this elegant, small footprint design, you have plenty of room to store an entire digital photo library, 125 hours of HD movies, or over 75 hours of DV video
• Extra data protection - For extra data protection, dedicate half the capacity for mirroring and automatically and instantaneously back up data every time you save it.
• Extra-fast performance - The lighting-fast combination of FireWire 400/800 and RAID striping yields the speed you need for fast, smooth video editing, an extra-responsive Photoshop scratch disk, rendering complex 3D objects or special effects, and saving huge blocks of data in record time.
• Easy to set up, easy to use - You're up and running in a few simple steps. RAID configuration is easy with WD's intuitive RAID Wizard software
• User serviceable - Easy access allows you to open the case and replace a drive. No need to send the entire system in for service

From the Manufacturer
Western Digital's WDG2T10000N My Book Premium Edition II 1 TB dual-drive storage system offers RAID mirroring for extra data protection or RAID striping for extraordinary capacity and performance. Triple interface and a powerful combination of features and performance make this system the storage solution of choice for creative professionals, workgroups, small offices, and anyone looking for extra assurance that their data is safe.

My Book Premium Edition II offers an extraordinary capacity with up to 2 TB of storage in an elegant, small footprint design. The system supplies plenty of space to store an entire digital photo library, your HD movie collection, and hours and hours of DV video.

The triple interface provides flexibility and performance with connections for ultra-fast FireWire 800, as well as FireWire 400 and USB 2.0. The lightning-fast combination of FireWire 400/800 and RAID striping yields the speed you need for fast, smooth video editing, an extra-responsive Photoshop scratch disk, rendering complex 3D objects or special effects, and saving huge blocks of data in record time.

My Book Premium Edition II's intelligent drive management features--such as automatic power-up, safe shutdown, and LED activity lights--make this storage system especially easy to use. And an efficient convection cooling system keeps the unit running cool and remarkably quiet.

RAID Wizard software steps you through RAID configuration, and network setup is a breeze with the unique, powerful remote access software. Dedicate half the capacity for mirroring, and you can automatically and instantaneously back up data every time you save it.

My Book Premium Edition II is ideal for users who want to:

• Gain peace of mind with a mirrored backup of important documents and images.
• Organize and archive vast photo and artwork libraries.
• Edit and exchange massive audio and video projects.

The My Book Premium Edition II is backed by a 1-year limited warranty.

What's in the Box
WDG2T10000N dual-drive storage system, FireWire 800 cable, FireWire 400 cable, USB cable, power adapter with cord, and quick install guide.

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Customer Reviews

Great external!
The My Book Premium Edition II is a very good external. I bought mine after doing quite a bit of research on the net trying to find out everything I could before I chose which 1TB external I wanted. There were too few reviews for me to be sure I was making the right purchase so I'm going to pass on what I've learned about this external.

(1) The noise level: I've seen quite a few reviews stating that the drives are extremely loud. This is completely wrong. The drives themselves are extremely quiet in fact, quieter than my older LaCie which I can hear across my room, unlike the WD. What is noisy is the fan, but it runs only very rarely. It runs for a few seconds when you first start it up and then it's a bit noisy but quickly silences itself. During normal running it barely comes on. To give you an idea how much running I do on my externals I have my music on there and I'm listening to it just about 24/7. During that time the fan never comes on. It came on a few times when I was transferring the 100+GB of music to it, but even then it was a short time before it lowered itself down to silence again.

(2) The power button: I've also heard complaints about the power button. I just want to clarify some peoples misunderstandings about it so no one else is worried. The power button works just as you would expect, just like my Mac in fact. Push the button to start it up and it starts instantly. When you want to shut it down, after ejecting it, you hold the power button for a few seconds and it shuts down. This is done so you don't accidentally push the big button on the front and shut it off during a big file transfer and damage the drive.

(3) RAID 0 or 1 only: This is a small thing for some people but for me it was a bit of a disappointment. You can only select from RAID O or RAID 1, no Linear support. This means you either have to choose having two 500 externals, one the mirror of the other or having your files split in half over both drives. The down side of splitting them like that, in Striped mode, is that if you lose one drive you lose all your files on both.

The transfer speed due to FireWire 800 and Striping is extremely fast and in that respect I'm very happy with the external. The only think keeping it from not being perfect is the lack of Linear Raid support.

Rocky setup with little help
For Macintosh users, this device definitely needs some additional instruction. My husband bought the black version of this drive to use with our Macs and Airport Extreme. The first thing to know is that the black version (Premium) comes preformatted as NTFS. You must reformat the drive as HFS+ for the Airport Extreme to recognize it.

If you want to use this drive with your Macintosh, you cannot reformat the drive using the USB cable - you MUST plug it directly into the Mac using the Firewire cable (it comes with all the cables). I reformatted the drive to HFS+ using the Disk Utility, then I installed the Firmware update which I downloaded from Western Digital's website, and only then did I use the MyBook RAID utility that came on the CD to mirror the drives. Now it works with the Airport Extreme, and I have a great drive accessible from anywhere on our wireless network.

Ready for Takeoff
I've used a number of WD Mybook products. When I used several Mybook Essential Editions with a software RAID solution on a Windows box, they performed well, they were quiet, and I was happy with them.

When I moved them to a Mac server running OS X RAID their power saving feature would periodically cause the raid volume to degrade and require repair (a 20-50 hour process) which was completely unacceptable so I bought this unit with its "internal" RAID support.

Performance using Firewire was better than USB but not by a significant amount as I would have expected. It seems to work well under RAID 1 under OS X at least. My only issue is this units incredibly loud fan. The fan seems to have at least three speeds, quiet (like a cpu fan) , loud (like a large desktop PC fan), and "ready for takeoff" (a cross between a dental drill and a server rack).

Fortunately "ready for takeoff" usually just lasts a few seconds at power-up. When running "quiet" this unit is great, but so far it seems to be spending most of its time "loud" Its actually bad enough and stays this way long enough that I may return the unit.

If you are sticking it in a loud environment, I'm sure it would be fine, but such is not the case for me.