 Concerns about the software and virtual CD are unfounded |
| Review Date: January 14, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Brian Webster, |
Just received the drive. Hooked it up with Firewire to my iMac running OsX 10.6 Snow Leopard. Set up was a breeze -- I just plugged it in and connected to computer according to the instructions enclosed with the drive and it was ready to use. My iMac automatically recognized it and I was ready to use it in about 1 minute flat.
As some reviewers have noted, when the drive is connected a virtual CD icon appears on the desktop. I installed the WD software on this virtual drive in order to personalize the display on the front of the drive. The software interface is very nice and very user-friendly. However, I have not run the backup software because I elected to use Time Machine to do my backups. Time Machine backed up to the drive with no problems.
I was concerned about the virtual CD referred to by some other reviewers because I also don't like to clutter up my desktop with icons. However, I was pleased to find that removing this virtual CD is very straightforward. Just click on the WD icon that appears in the menu bar of the Finder, and select "Unmount CD" The virtual CD icon disappears and can be made to reappear at any time by clicking on the same icon and selecting "Mount CD". There is no need to download any software to do this, and no problem doing this with the My Book Studio, contrary to some previous reviews!
The drive itself feels solid. The housing is plastic, but it looks good and does not feel cheap. The drive is also fairly quiet -- certainly quieter than the Maxtor One Touch external drive that this drive has replaced -- and I like the energy saver features.
Overall I am very happy with my purchase so far and can reassure any readers out there that there is no reason to be concerned about the software or the virtual CD. |
Excellent Drive
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| Review Date: November 21, 2009 |
| Reviewer: D. J. Hampton, |
Very impressed with this drive. After reading an online review, became very interested in the drive. I have used Western Digital drives for years to back up my media on my mac. Last year I bought a mac mini and set it up as a HTPC. For the last month I have been digitizing my 200+ DVD movie library, converting the vids to H.264 using an El Gato Turbo, and saving them to the external drive to use with Plex. I filled up my previous 500 GB drive pretty quickly. The speed of this drive over my previous Firewire 400 drive is unbelievable. I now have my iTunes library, my iPhoto/Aperture library, and my movies all on one drive. Bought a 2nd 2TB USB drive for back-ups and I am all good.
The e-ink label is very handy and easily customizable using the built in software.
Overall I will say that this continues my very positive Western Digital experiences I have had with their drives over the last 6 years. Strongly recommend you use your mac software. |
Works and Looks Good.
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| Review Date: January 4, 2010 |
| Reviewer: E. J Tastad, Marion, IA United States |
UPDATE: There is new software available for this drive that lets you completely eliminate the virtual CD. Great for those that don't like it popping up all the time. The drawback is that the virtual CD is required for drive encryption.
Pros:
Fast Firewire 800 Works with most Macs
Sleek Design
Unique Status Display
Works well, low power, low heat, and well ventilated
Cons:
Intrusive WD SmartWare software
Plastic construction instead of Aluminum
Verdict:
This hard drive works flawlessly, so I gave it 5 stars despite the intrusive software. A nice external hard drive with some unique features, but the intrusive software might bother some users. There aren't a lot of choices for Firewire 800 drives for mac users, and this is certainly a sound offering with about twice the performance of the USB 2.0 connection.
Performance:
Doing some file writes by dragging large files and folders to the HDD, the USB 2.0 write times averaged about 35 MB/s and the Firewire 800 transfer times were about 63 MB/s, so it is definitely worth using Firewire 800 over USB 2.0. Power consumption is low and the drive is reasonably quite. It has no loud fans, but you do hear regular hard drive noises.
Usage:
Why is the software intrusive? WD decided to use a "virtual CD" that mounts whenever the hard drive is mounted. Also, use of their WD SmartWare program is required to use the drive. They do provide a tool to disable their software on some drives, but that doesn't work on the My Book Studio drive.
The drive was easy to setup and came pre-formatted as OS X Journaled. All I had to do is change a couple settings so the WD SmartWare software wouldn't open every time the drive mounted and change the label on the display on the drive to what I wanted. I use it as a Time Machine drive, which is setup by running Time Machine and selecting the My Book drive as the backup drive. |
BRILLANT!
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| Review Date: December 24, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Tarun Chachra, Hillsborough, NJ |
The My Book has easily achieved design excellence coupled with superb functionality to deliver an outstanding product. This drive not only carries a killer look, sure to please all MAC fans, but also comes with everything you need for your backup scheme.
Included: Drive, Ac Adapter, Firewire 800 cable, USB to Mini USB Cable, and Firewire 400 to Firewire 800 adapter.
The included cables alone make this an attractive unit so that all connectivity options are available out of the box.
For the purpose of this review I used the drive on a Macbook Pro via Firewire 800.
Once the drive is mounted it shows up on the Mac as the My Book and you get an icon to launch the WD SmartWare application which allows you to do the following:
1. Back Up Files
2. Set Up Drive
1 - Back Up Files - Click on this and you are prompted to install the WD SmartWare software on your computer. Once the quick installation is done you are shwon a great graphical display of the contents on your MAC and the contents of the drive. I have uploaded an image that shows what the graphical display shows. Simply click on the Run Backup button and voila, your content is now being backed up to the drive and you are shown a live graphical display of its progress. The software automatically backs up all documents, mail, movies, music, pictures, and other data (which I believe are application files, etc).
2 - Set Up Drive - This portion of the SmartWare application allows you to label your drive so that you can see the name on the LCD display. What is really cool here is that even if you power down the drive and or put it on a shelf, the name still displays...AWESOME feature. Once the label is set you are asked to set the security of the drive with a password and a password hint. The security basically insures that no one but you can access your data. A warning is shown stating that the software cannot retrieve your password if you lose it and you must check off "I Understand" before you continue. Once security is complete you are prompted to register your drive with WD and asked if you wish to receive communication about updates etc...
Quick Note: The LCD display shows the name of your drive and the free space right on the front...no guess work needed.
The WD SMartWare software is a pleasure to use after setup in that it gives you the graphical display and ability to backup/restore etc on demand. You are also able to check for software updates from within the application. It also offers you the ability to change your settings/labels at any time. There is a Diagnostics section to run tests on the drive, if you experience problems. A Sleep Timer option allows you to adjust when the drives goes into standby mode. Finally you are given the ability to erase the entire drive and start over..if the need arises.
I think this is an excellent product and designed wonderfully with the user in mind. I have no harm in recommending this item and will do so... 5 STARS easily.
A quick note on backups: I am an IT person by trait and always recommend the 3-2-1 strategy. 3 Copies of all of your data, 2 on-site, and 1 off-site. A great way to always insure that you have what you need incase of a disaster. The WD My Book studio will make it easier with the LCD labels as you can use the date of the last backup on the drive. A quick piece of advice.
Please let me know if you have any questions via comments and I will answer them as best as I can. Thanks.
QUICK UPDATE: Smartware version 1.1.1.4 is included with the drive. The western digital website still shows 1.1.1.3 as the latest... Just an FYI. |
Very satisfied so far
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| Review Date: March 24, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Harold W. Miller, |
| This is my seventh external hard drive. I now have three externals happily chugging along on my iMac (3.5 T total plus .25 T internal). My first cost around $500 and held 40 megabytes of data, mostly documents and applications. This Western Digital drive cost me $219 with no sales tax or shipping/handling and holds 2,000,000 megabytes of data--movies, music, pictures, and, yes, documents. In other words forty thousand times more data storage costing less than half the price--a lot less if you add inflation into the mix. Installation was a no brainer--the instructions had no words, just a picture of which plug to put into which port. I was up and running and transferring files from overstuffed smaller hard drives to this data barn in, maybe, five minutes. The uninstallable software that people have complained about isn't there. Either the software is was windows-specific of WD responded to the criticism by removing it. I prefer to add it later if I choose, even a few wasted megabytes of space is something I would want to avoid. The drive belies the enormity of the hard drive on the inside: it's a neat, upright silver with the LCD read-out on the front. It has an adequate number of ports and has all the major protocols being handled (except for the brand new USB 3.0). I see no minus so far and negatives. I do recommend using this because it does have e-SATA and firewire 800 ports which comes in handy transferring 600 gigabytes of files. I recommend this hard drive. |
Fast & Quiet
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| Review Date: December 27, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Flavio Machado, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil |
| Very fast and quiet. The screen is very useful to identify each drive when you have more then one. |
No hassle
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| Review Date: December 31, 2009 |
| Reviewer: ostawookiee, Winston-Salem, NC USA |
Straight out of the box plugged it into my Macbook, Macbook asks "Do you want to use this drive to backup with Time Capsule?" answer yes and off it goes. No formatting necessary (already Mac Extended partition). A full backup (100GB for me) took about 90 mins the initial time (over the USB).
It comes with 3 connectors - USB 2.0, FireWire 800 (long cord), Firewire 800 (6-inch cord).
The small indicator light is nice - other drives I have use large and bright indicators I find distracting and annoying. Runs pretty quietly. This drive is way better than the Maxtor I have.
The display on the front is pretty useless. You can show the name of the drive - but unless you have a bank of these it doesn't seem like you'd need that. Mine doesn't even show the percentage full on it, so I think for that feature it requires you using their backup software.
There's no real directions in the box, just some warranty and "do not submerge" kind of information in horribly translated English. The documentation is on the drive in softcopy. |
Runs Quietly.
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| Review Date: January 21, 2010 |
| Reviewer: A*, New York, N.Y. United States |
I have gone through my fair share of drives from Segate to Iomega and have had a fair share of problems as well, the usual stutters and clunkers. So I waited as long as I could to review this product. I hate to back things up and lose it to a faulty drive and Western Digital isn't truly my brand of choice. But I have to admit, I love this drive! The Smart Display is great, telling you how much storage is left, capacity gauge, name and a drive lock indicator. I had a tacky tape label on my old drive and had to plug it in to see how much space was left. The indicators also aren't blindingly bright. On my older drives, you could light the Grand Canyon at midnight and I had a piece of electrical tape over them.
As for performance, the drive runs extremely quiet. I would say about as low key as my Macbook Pro. I haven't had one hiccup. It was a simple plug and use operation, no hassles.
A great drive with excellent features. And so far, has performed above my expectations. |
Great drive
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| Review Date: January 28, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Dr. Stuart Cheshire, San Jose, CA USA |
| I've bought two of these fast FireWire 800 drives. The Virtual CD feature is an annoyance, but not a serious problem. The "digital paper" label, which shows the drive's name and free space even when the power is off, is a great idea, but it doesn't work unless you install their custom software on every computer. The moment you connect the drive to a computer without their custom software installed the drive doesn't know how much free space it has any more. It would be nice if the drive firmware were smart enough to know how much free space it has by itself, instead of requiring the host computer to tell it. |
Nice drive but useless software.
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| Review Date: March 3, 2010 |
| Reviewer: S. Antonios, |
| Nice drive but useless software. Wish WD did not include it with all these drives. |
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