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Western Digital launches a 6TB external hard drive
STORAGE MAKER Western Digital (WD) has launched its My Book Studio Edition II 6TB external hard drive.
The 6TB drive is available now online for $549.99. WD was unavailable to comment on UK price and availability but the 2TB model is currently priced at £199.95 and the 4TB version goes for £399.95. The 6GB model supports Firewire 400 and 800, eSATA and USB 2.0 interfaces. Western Digital says that 6TB is a third more space than previously available and equates to up to 1.2 million photos, 460 hours of video or 1.5 million songs.
The hard drive is Windows and Mac ready but beware of which version you have, as it might not support the size of the drive. Mac OS X 10.5.2 and 10.6 are supported but 10.4 can only cope with a maximum of 2TB. It's a similar story on the Microsoft side of things with the hard drive working on Windows Vista and Windows 7 but the older Windows 2000 and Windows XP versions will support only up to 2TB.
Aimed at users who demand vast amounts of space and backup functions, the dual hard drive supports RAID 0, striped, and RAID 1, mirrored, and it's compatible with Apple's Time Machine backup utility. It also has its own automatic backup software and a capacity usage gauge. µ
Tags: Hardware
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"The 6GB model supports Firewire 400 and 800, eSATA and USB 2.0 interfaces"
OK so I'm assuming that was a simple typo but USB 2.0 isn't a typo? Shame no USB 3.0 interface. Thankfully both my desktop and laptop have eSATA support but the eSATA port on the desktop is at the back and not on the front panel :(
Have I got my math wrong, or would it take about 200 hours to read or write this whole drive sequentially? If so, you really need to plan any whole-drive formats or verification passes to coincide with your summer holiday...
I'm still wrestling with the question of which is the most practical interface: USB 2, USB 3, eSATA, or Ethernet? I suppose the drive's intrinsic read/write speed is the limiting factor whichever you adopt.
I'm on my third Western Digital "Elements" external disk drive. The original purchase failed within 60 days, and the first replacement failed within 40 days. I've had this one for about a week. I'm expecting that this one will fail in about a month, unless I decide to sell it at half price on Ebay.
Six TBytes? Right. So, about the time I get all of my important data copied over to it, the unit will fail. Well, I suppose that is one way to deal with excessive amounts of personal data.
Sorry, no more Western Digital drives for me, this year.
The failure rate on ALL 2TB drives is 20% or so over a 1TB drive. I'm assuming the 6TB makes up for the fact that you'll be losing 60% of it...
Oh, and stop telling us how many photos and video hours and that useless crap is. What is I want to store my uncompressed camera raws, flac videos and shittime MOV's? I'd get 4 photos, 2 songs and a 3 second hi-def clip on that thing...
Been a week and I'm still waiting for my 6 tb to transfer over:)
This behemoth is nothing more than a pair of WD 3GB drives slapped together in a double-wide enclosure.
Move along, nothing to see here.
Besides a typo in the order of just 1,000 I have another question:
Why dont you mention the capacity of that disk when running Linux???
Harry
From 4 GB to 6 GB is a 50% increase, from 6 GB to 4 GB is a 33% decrease. You'd think that people in the technology industry would have better math skills.