Western Digital My Book Studio Edition 2 6TB
The Pros: The My Book Studio Edition II external hard drive has a gigantic 6TB of storage. This is probably the best feature. It also has RAID 0 and RAID 1. It supports USB 2.0, FireWire (400/800), and eSATA connections. The drive is not too expensive and boasts some good speeds.
The Cons: It does not support USB 3.0. It runs warm and can seem buggy at times. You have to buy an eSATA cable separately.
Summary: The My Book Studio Edition II is a good external hard drive for those who need and want a ton of storage. Although, the firmware can seem to be faulty at times.
Details: Boasting 6TB of storage this is one of the largest external hard drives currently out on the market. It has different types of inputs and you can replace the hard drives within it fairly easily, but these drives have to be powergreen drives from western digital is the only thing. Sadly, the drive is not USB 3.0 compliant and can seem to take a bit to be recognized on a new system.
But this is fine because it offers fast speeds and a price that is actually a good one for what you get. If size and ease of use is what you want in an
Western Digital My Book Studio Edition 2
hard drive then it does not get much better than this. It will work for both Windows and Mac operating systems.
The My Book Studio Edition II has a great, easy access design. The door is on the top where it can be easily opened without any kind of tools to replace the hard drives if necessary.
Look at the front, it has a vertical white light that is a status light for the drive. Then, on the back are all the inputs which include USB 2.0, Firewire for both 400 and 800 and a eSATA slot. It comes with all the cables for these slots besides the eSATA one. This drive also does not support USB 3.0 mainly because it is compatible with both Mac and PC. Mac of course does not support USB 3.0 yet.
Also you’ll see a power button on the back which is used to turn it on and off. It has a sleep mode also that will make it go dormant after about 10 minutes of non-use. Sadly, there is noway to turn this feature off. Also, when you plug this external hard drive in it may take about 2 minutes or so for it to be recognized by your system. This is the buggy firmware problem mentioned above. Hopefully this is just a temporary problem that will be fixed with an update in the future.
The Western Digital My Book Studio Edition 2 comes preformatted for Mac but can easily be reformatted for PCs with the included software.
Performance
The Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II performs nicely overall.
When using eSATA it performed at 99mbps writing and 109mbps reading. This is practically just as fast as a USB 3.0 connection which is fast. When using USB 2.0 it the writing speeds were 26mbps and 46mbps for reading which is a little above average. When using Firewire 400 the speeds were 20mbps for writing and 42mbps for reading.
Warranty
The warranty is 5 years which is a above average for a warranty on a external hard drive. Customers support seems to be excellent with a dedicated area on western digital’s site just for this drive.
Conclusion
This is a great drive for both Mac and PC especially if you are looking for the storage space. The speeds overall are good. If you are looking for pure speed then there are faster drives for PC’s, but doesn’t get much better than this in terms of Mac.
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