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Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II 4TB
Product: My Book Studio Edition II 4TB
Website: www.wdc.com/mybookstudioeditionii
System Specifications: 2 x 2TB WD Caviar Green 5,400RPM HDD, 2 x FireWire 800, USB 2.0, eSATA
Price: €699,99, £599.99, $649.99
WHEN WESTERN DIGITAL announced the world's first two terabyte hard disk drive we knew it would be only a matter of time before that found its way into the company's My Book external storage line. WD has populated several models in this series with its 2TB HDD. Here we turn our attention to the My Book Studio Edition II 4TB external storage unit.
My Book Studio Edition II comes populated with not one but two WD WD20EADS Caviar Green 2TB hard drives with 32MB cache running at 5,400RPM. It is configurable either as RAID 0, where data is striped across the two drives, or as RAID 1, which mirrors all of the data onto both drives. Using RAID 1 halves the storage capacity to 2TB, while RAID 0 provides access to the full 4TB as one single drive. RAID 0 doesn't provide redundant data protection but offers a slight write performance increase, while RAID 1 offers redundant data protection, in case either of the two hard drives fails and becomes inaccessible.
To appreciate the data loss protection afforded by RAID 1 mirroring, you can calculate the chance that both drives might fail within the same reasonably short period. If the probability that either drive might fail is 5 per cent, multiplying that probability by the same probability that the other drive might also fail gives you the probability of both drives failing at once, so 0.05 X 0.05 = 0.0025, or 0.25 per cent, that is, one quarter of one percent. That should make clear the data loss protection benefit of RAID 1 mirroring.
WD's external drive units have several different types of I/O ports available in all of the My Book series. The My Book Studio Edition II has a USB 2.0 port, an eSATA port and two FireWire 800 ports. What's missing in our opinion are native FireWire 400 ports. WD provides a cable with a FireWire 800 plug on one end and a FireWire 400 plug on the other end as a way around this problem. This works, until you misplace the bespoke cable and cannot use a regular Firewire 400 cable instead. We'd have preferred to also see FireWire 400 ports, as many computers still use that format and those cables are common.
On the subject of ports, we believe WD missed a trick and left off an Ethernet port. It does have devices sitting just above this My Book product in its catalogue that include an Ethernet 10/100/1000Mbps port. If it had included an Ethernet port, then the Mybook Studio Edition II could work as a simple storage area network (SAN) device by enabling ATA over Ethernet (AoE) access.
The My Book Studio Edition II comes preconfigured for Mac users, with its drive format already set up in the factory so Mac users can be up and running within seconds. Some time and effort must be applied for Windows Vista users to reconfigure and reformat the unit before they can use it. This might well indicate what market Western Digital is really aiming this 4TB monster at, as the unit is also compatible with the Apple Timemachine backup software. Windows XP and 2000 users are left out in the cold here, unless they use RAID 1, as the full 4TB capacity of this unit isn't accessible by those operating systems due to the 2TB limit of their filesystem. Also, Linux users won't be able to use this external hard drive.
The device is very quiet when in operation, even while backing up large volumes of data. This is due to the system being entirely fan-less and the hard disk drives used fall into the low power, low noise green range. WD says that the whole system consumes one-third less power than a standard dual drive backup unit running 1TB 7200RPM drives and all thanks to its GreenPower technology. We didn't test the claim, but knowing Western Digital's low power consumption ethos we're willing to believe it.
Gaining access to WD Caviar Green 2TB drives is easy enough, if ever needed. The external case is almost tool free. With a few presses here and a pull on a tab keeping the drives firmly fixed inside the My Book II and you've got the individual drives in your hand. This could also been seen a drawback, as although maintenance is fairly straight forward and easy enough, theft of drives could also be easy too, as there's no locking or security mechanisms in place. There is a Kensington lock on the rear that can be used for securing the base unit, but it's easy to remove the hard drives.
There's some token software added by Western Digital for backing up to the drive, with some other utilities thrown in along with some trial software. WD Anywhere Backup is its own simple to use backup software, which runs on both PC and Mac for copying data to the backup drive and restoring from it. We would have thought the install CD could have also been used as a boot disk for restoring a whole system if needed, but alas this isn't the case. Also included is WD RAID Manager software, which is needed for getting the My Book Studio Edition II up and running on a Microsoft Windows computer. This software is simple, but it's needed to configure the device for either RAID 0 or RAID 1. It runs only under Windows.
We didn't run formal benchmarks on the My Book Studio Edition II external storage unit because, well, the hard drives in it are 5,400RPM devices. They're somewhat slower at transferring large volumes of data than the faster 7,200RPM hard drives found in many desktop PCs, and they have data transfer rates comparable with the 5,400RPM drives found in many notebook PCs. But no one buys such an external storage unit for its speed. Products like this one are used primarily for archival and backup purposes, that is, for storing large volumes of data. Quiet operation, low power consumption and reliability are the qualities that matter in external storage products, not speed. This unit appears to have those qualities.
We did run a lot of file transfers to test its operation and get a feel for the speed of the My Book, using every port. Transferring data to and from the My Book Studio Edition II was fast enough for normal use and backup purposes, comparable with using the Caviar 5,400RPM drives internally. Obviously higher transfer speeds were obtained using the eSATA port at 3Gbps, but the FireWire 800 port at 800Mbps and the USB 2.0 port at 480Mbps worked seamlessly as well.
After using the My Book for a while, we did wonder if the unit is really worth the price. Looking at the individual component costs made us pause. Two WD 2TB drives cost around £150 each, making the grand total of £300 where the My Book Studio Edition II comes in at £600. We can't help but think that the I/O interfaces, the drive enclosure and the meager software included all together can't be worth as much as the hard drives themselves.
In Short
Although 4TB of storage or perhaps 2TB mirrored could surely be needed by some out there, we think Western Digital is offering the product to sell its 2TB hard drives to Mac users. The device could have better connectivity in the form of two Firewire 400 ports wired in parallel with the Firewire 800 ports, and even an Ethernet port, in our opinion. At 2.63kilos this is in no way a portable drive, unlike others in WD's My Book series. Finally, at £600 it strikes us as more than just a little too expensive. µ
The Good:
4TB capacity, 2TB mirrored,
RAID 0 or RAID 1,
Several I/O ports for PC connectivity
Quiet and low power usage.
The Bad:
Apple default settings,
No Firewire 400 or Ethernet ports,
WD RAID Manager software runs only under Microsoft Windows,
No Linux support.
The Ugly:
High price.
Bartender's Report:
7/10
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Claiming a drive failure rate of 0.25% per year for these devices is absurd. More like 25% failure per year. Do a Google search and see how many complaints there are of one drive after another failing until the warranty period runs out. I'm honestly surprised WD still sells these things.
Why do you think WD touts how easy it is for customers to service the unit themself?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital_My_Book#Morse_code
"The Morse code message written into the drive case is made up of a selection of the words "personal", "reliable", "innovative", "simple", and "design".[17] The first occurrence of "innovative" on the My Book Pro and My Book World Edition features a misspelling and reads "innovateve"."
Google is your friend.
is there a message in morse code on the back of the casing ???
cos it sure looks like morse to me....
anyone care to decode it ???
.25% would be the chance of both drives failing in say a year, but the chance of the second drive failing before you replace the first defective drive is more like .0025% if say the it took about 3 days.
And yes using RAID0 would double the chance of failure. It also adds other issues too that if say in a few years the enclosure dies and you pull the drives off you need a compatable chipset in the new device to be able to pull the data off.
$649 / 1.5 (U$D to Euro) = 433.33.
Add vat 433.33 * 1.2 = 520.
Add a exchange-ratio insurance (although, these days, it's more likely the Euro will get to 1.6 rather than 1.4....) and you'll get to 550 Euros. Not 699.
But we shouldn't complain. Brits, as usual, get the first prize for exchange-rate ripping.
USA 4 Africa??? Nope, it's euro-commies for USA.....
While I haven't owned one of these, I certainly won't. I was one of the poor saps who bought a MyBook World and had it fail after a month (like the rest of them did). Western Digital replaced the dead hard drive and then that one quit after a few months.
The IT guys at my office bought a few of the 1TB versions of this device and none of them lasted six months.
I figure it's a serious design flaw Western Digital doesn't bother to fix. The two drives are packed into a tiny case with an integrated power supply and just one 30mm fan. My bet is the drives just cook.
The only thing this device would be useful for is backup, but if you can't trust it what's the point?
The interface on these is far too slow; even the MyBook World with a supposed Gigabit Ethernet interface was far slower than a HDD in a $15 USB enclosure. Don't even think about sreaming video off of one of these.
Hopefully they stopped bundling that god-awful Mionet malware with this thing, too.
RAID 5 disks will get very similar but not identical workouts. Show me the evidence that IDENTICAL workloads will cause a significantly higher chance of failure compared to similar workloads.
Disks fail due to a variety of reasons, but even in the same batch you'll never get two absolutely identical drives. There will always be small variations in the mechanical and electrical tolerances of components, the precision of assembly, the faulty sectors that are mapped out, the amount of heating and cooling that the drive undergoes, handling during shipping etc. Trying to prove a statistical difference between failure rates of disks under similar and identical workloads is going to be more than a little tricky as they're never going to be as identical as you seem to think.
There is statistical work to show that you can reduce the chance of a two drive failure by picking drives from different batches or manufacturers, but I've only ever seen it applied to large RAID 5 arrays where the risk of a second drive failure is much higher.
That's RAID-5. The workloads on the drives aren't identical; they do mostly come from the same batches, but they read and write different things, unlike RAID-1.
Too simplistic an analysis of drive failures. RAID 5 arrays are MUCH more at risk of a two drive failure (in, say, a 5 drive array once a single drive has failed then the whole array is at risk if any of the other 4 fail before the degraded array rebuilds onto a replacement drive. There's slightly less than 4 times the probability of one of these 4 drives failing than the second drive of a RAID 1 drive array also failing before replacement of the failed drive. RAID 5 arrays are however traditionally built from drives from the same batch and very rarely is this a problem.
The rates of error may vary between batches, but the time to failure of each individual drive within a batch is highly variable, even with identical workloads.
... is extremely high.
Why? Because both drives are going to be from the same series, using the exact same batch of materials, etc.
On top of that, both drives in a RAID-1 field will be doing the same tasks - reading at the same time (the controller needs to verify that both give the same data) and writing at the same time (because that's the point of a mirror).
If you have two identical drives with identical workload, take a guess about the probability of both failing in a same short period of time.
So, if you need a mirror, either get drives from very different batches, or use drives from different manufacturers.
Because of the need for an MS Windows tool and because of the lack of a 1 Gbit/s ethernet interface, I won't waste my money on this one.
RAID 1 decreases the odds of both drives failing, but RAID 0 *increases* the odds you will lose your data. If there is a 5% chance of 1 drive failing, there is a 10% chance of either drive failing. With RAID 0, if either drive fails, you lose everything.
If you need the storage capacity of RAID 0, use two independent drives. The chance of failure is the same as for RAID 0, but you only lose the data on the one drive instead of both.
Only about $450 in the U.S.
The thing works fine under Linux. I used the windows tool to reset it to 2TB RAID-1, partitioned/formatted with linux, no problems at all.
1) The chance of a single drive failing IN A YEAR is about 5%, the chance of two drives failing in the same period of a week is MUCH less than 0.25%
2) RAID 0 gives you MUCH higher throughput than a single drive, but as you're likely to max out USB or even FireWire 800 with the single then you won't see much advantage (eSATA may prove more useful)
3) FireWire 400 to 800 adaptors are available as well as third party 400 to 800 cables. The whole point of having TWO 800 (or 400) ports is that you can CHAIN them. You can hang up to 127 drives off of the one controller.
4) XP and 2000 are limited by the MBR boot sector descriptor that they use. They simply cannot understand bigger single volumes (although I believe you can make them span multiple 2TB volumes in a software RAID 0 configuration). This is not WDs fault.
5) MacOS defaults to GUID partition tables, which can be much larger than 2TB. Vista and now Windows 7 also understand GUID tables.
6) WD looked at what their buyers were using and concluded that more MacOS users wanted this product than Vista/Win7, so they pre-format it as HFS+ rather than NTFS. Reformatting is pretty trivial.
7) Putting an ethernet controller in the box is far from trivial, and it compromises performance badly. Cheap NAS controllers max out at about 5-6MB/sec, even on Gigabit ethernet. USB can push 30-40MB/sec, Firewire 800 about 75-80MB/sec and eSATA about 150MB/sec. You need a fairly quick CPU and lots of cache RAM to make NAS work well, and that costs money. 4TB @ 6M/sec? Really?
If you REALY want 4TB of network backing store then for little more you can buy 5x1TB drives and a Thecus 5200 Pro, which gives you 4TB of RAID 5 storage available as either NAS, or much faster iSCSI SAN over Gigabit ethernet.