Customer Reviews

Western Digital WDG2T10000N My Book Premium Edition II 1 TB USB 2.0/Firewire RAID System

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Love the My Book Premium drives. I own three 500GB versions - this is my first 1 TB drive.

I work in entertainment doing 3d animation and compositing so I thought I would give this a whirl in the RAID 0 configuration.

Here's what I found:

Noise: NOT a problem. The Fan is virtually silent and the unit only sounds like a little hovercraft taking off for 5 seconds or so on start up. After that it is Ninja-like in it's stealth.

Using WD My Book RAID Manager: I have the drives plugged into a PCI 1394 controller card. The My Book Raid Manager utility that allows you to change the raid configuration and such will not work with such a set up. You have to plug the drive into an available USB port connected directly to the motherboard. Then you can change the RAID. After you have configured it the way you want then you can plug the unit back into the 1394 card to take advantage of the speed of the 800 interface. You won't have to configure the RAID very often - only once to get the one you want - but not knowing how to do it is frustrating - took an hour to get through the support chain to an answer. (very excellent support I might add- and free for 30 days after purchase)

Sleep: the drive goes to sleep after 10 minutes of non-activity - with a soft transition time starting after a few minutes. I found this to be a problem because I am working in 3D software and have my autosave/backup setting at 5 minutes. If you do any 3d you know why this is. So what I found was that my saves were taking 3 to 4 times normal and slowing down my productivity big-time because I had to wait for the drive to 'wake up'. The tech I talked to said that there was no way to change the setting and that they were working on a firmware update. If it wasn't for my specific use of the product in this way the spin up time is very acceptable and not a problem for most users.

All in all these drives are extremely reliable. I've had my first 3 for 2 years and never had a problem - and I hammer them pretty hard with large file transfers and huge HD res image files.

Duane Loose

This review covers the family of My Book Pro II/Premium II drives from Western Digital, since the primary differences between the 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0Tb dual-drive models involve the size of the drive pair only, as far as I can tell. I own the My Book Pro II 1.5Tb drive and have only configured it for the factory-default Raid 0 mode, since I wanted as much non-redundant storage as possible.

Anyone not familiar with external USB or Firewire drives may be surprised at the significantly slower data transfer; the USB or Firewire interface is the bottleneck, not the drive itself. For bulk storage at still-reasonable transfer rates and for the purchase price per byte, these large capacity drives can't be beat - as long as they are reliable and the user observes all the rules about making sure the drives are safe to physically disconnect from the computer (I won't cover the rules here; the operating system has its own Help section that can assist the user who is unsure of how to physically disconnect their drive without turning off the computer itself).

OK, back to the Western Digital My Book II drive... when the drive is received, the Raid Manager software package should be installed before plugging in the drive. After I did this and plugged in the drive, I had one problem after another with the drive disappearing in Windows, the fan going very loud when there was no heat issue to make it do so, then the drive would act like it over-heated and shut down. Twice I received replacement drives and both replacement drives acted the same way.

I figured the problem wasn't the drive, so I tried the second replacement on a second PC running Vista; same problems. I next moved the drive to a PC running Windows XP; no problem - the drive ran quietly and reliably.

It turns out there is currently (12/22/07) a problem with Windows Vista and the way it stores driver information. The fix is found in their technical bulletin 1708 (go to www.wdc.com, support, frequently asked questions and enter "1708" in the "Search by Keyword" field. This has solved all my problems with my drive and I can now recommend this drive without reservations, however Vista is due for its first significant "patch", SP1, in the first half of 2008 and these sorts of patches have sometimes provoked new problems. I do think the solution presented in technical bulletin 1708 would still be helpful if the SP1 patch caused further problems, however.

I purchased this unit March 18th of 2007 and the unit began to fail after the first six months of use. One or both of the drives started going bad. I called WD and they RMA'd the unit.

Six months after that, the one or more of the drives are failing again. The unit is only 30 days past the WD 1 year warranty and they will not replace the unit even though it failed for the exact same reasons. They don't consider the Warranty from the time of replacement, just the original purchase.

To add insult to injury, their only suggestion was to use one of WD's preferred data recovery vendors to get the data back. I don't want the data back because it was the backup, not the primary drive. What a joke..

This has turned into a $300 mistake meaning that this is the LAST business WD gets from me. My company has bought probably $4k worth of their product over the past 5 years. So, any external unit I buy from now on will NOT have WD on the housing, controller, drive, etc.

Good luck WD! You just lost another customer....

Eric Caldwell
Web-JIVE.com

I was given this drive as a gift about a year or so ago to be used for my Mac Time Machine back-ups. At first I was absolutely delighted - everything worked just as it should have. And it still does with one exception... one critical deal-breaking exception: shortly after receiving this item, I downloaded their latest driver (dated 11/2008). After that, the drive no longer stays mounted - after several minutes of inactivity, it simply powers down and dismounts. My computer is still wide awake and functioning, but the My Book decides to take a nap. It will start-up again when I power it on, but it's totally useless for what I had wanted it for: Mac Time Machine back-ups which happen every hour automatically. Can't back-up if the drive is asleep, can it. One star as a result. Hate it. But hey, other than the fact that it basically won't work, it's a great drive! In the future when I buy external hard drives for my Mac. they will NOT be made by Western Digital. Couple of positive things to note: it's very quiet... can't even detect it's spinning, really. Also, the raid set-up was easy as pie and has worked flawlessly.

I didn't discover until after purchasing the drive that WD has not certified any of their drives for 64 bit operating systems. I could not get the drivers to install and the drive wasn't recognized in My Computer. Since I bought this to run a mirror backup for photo editing I'll be sending it back and going another route.

I've gone through a few MyBook's in the past. A 320GB one which lasted for about 2 hours (as soon as I reboot my computer it never worked again) and a 250GB that worked fine for about 2 weeks before stopping. Both were on flat surfaces and never touched.

With my PC hard drive already filled and me trying to live off just 2GB of free space (constantly finding new things to delete as needed) I just gave up and decided to give the MyBook 1 more try. This time I went for the 1TB Premium and so far it's been working good for me. I'm not using the Firewire connection (and can assume that my previous problems might have been slightly related to me using USB as I have so many USB devices chained together it might have just not provided enough power to run the drive as needed).

This one has been working good for me for the past few months - I like that you can service it yourself (by swapping in and out hard drives) opposed to sending it off.

You can also choose to either use it as a 1TB drive or a 500GB drive (with a 500GB Backup). I was intending to use it as a 1 TB drive but the way it's designed is to split files across both drives.. that means that if 1 dies, likely all (or at least most) data will be unreadable from either drive. Taking it the safe way out (and since 500GB is a lot anyways) I went for the 500GB auto-backup option.

So far it works good, it's fast and I can stream large files from it without a problem.

Unfortunately, as a lot have pointed out, it can get LOUD. Mine seems to be dead-silent about 45% of the time, a medium hum (although still slightly louder than my PC) 50% of the time (even when not accessing it) and a LOUD whirring noise about 5% of the time (I'm guessing this is when it backs up data to the 2nd drive??). It can be quite the strange sound at first, and even a bit scary hearing it make such a loud noise.

My problems with it so far: After rebooting my PC, I get a "New hardware detected" message about the drive half the time. I can continue to use the drive just fine without reinstalling it (and just quitting the new hardware wizard) but the included applications just don't work (the ones designed to provide the drive status/health) - they can detect the drive but just say "UNAVAILABLE" next to each setting.. So I'm assuming it's working fine and backing up data as needed. I'll be very upset if it isn't!

I've tried reinstalling the drive and software but the problem still exists. Not a big deal as I don't need it (if its working fine), but people that use this to auto-backup your data may have problems.

Overall I'm happy with it. It was pricey but seems to be working good so far.

--

Update 10/31/2007:

I installed this drive onto a new PC about 1 month ago and have come across a few strange issues.
For some reason the Firewire plug is not recognizing the drive on my new PC (Windows Vista). USB seems to work fine though.
Possibly also related to running USB only, but for some reason the LOUD mode of this hard drive has also stopped (in the month I've had it connected, I haven't heard it once). Kind of strange, actually, leaving me wondering if it's due to the Firewire connection (because I've still been using the drive just as much as ever).
Even being limited to USB 2.0, the drive does run quite fast (fast enough to stream high quality video files without any lag/stuttering.. copying files to it seems to take a little longer than Firewire but not too much worse.)

Overall---good device. Main problem - WD tech support - hard to understand when talking to them - called twice, had to wait about 20 min before talking to someone overseas. Instructions shows it works with Vista - which it does -- as long as you don't want to use the RAID software that allows you to split the drive in half and back up all data on the other drive. Tech said you must hook up device to a machine with XP and then set up in RAID 1 format - then rehook up to Vista machine. If you only hook to Vista - you will only be able to use it in full 1 TB mode. I recommend the device - just not their tech support. Also, couldn't get firewire 400 to work with Vista - had to use USB. The loud fan noise others mention only comes on when it first powers up ..and then it's on for only about 5 seconds. I paid 200 via the popular auction site.