Western Digital's My Book Studio Edition II: 6 TB of low-cost storage
It's a great time to be in the market for mass storage for your Mac. Hardware manufacturers keep coming out with new solutions that either provide more speed (like SSDs) or greater capacity, and the prices keep coming down.
Western Digital is now shipping the My Book Studio Edition II, a two-drive enclosure filled with 6 TB (that's right, six terabytes) of RAID 0 storage and a quad-interface (FW800 / FW400 /eSata / USB2.0) for only US$549.99. That price is quite amazing, since the competing LaCie 4 Quadra array sells for almost $400 more. The My Book Studio Edition II takes advantage of WD's 3 TB Caviar Green drives, two of which are nestled into an enclosure. The product comes with a power adapter usable in the US, Canada and most European countries, FireWire 800 and USB cables, a FireWire 800/400 cable and a CD containing a user manual and a selection of software.
The My Book Studio Edition II drive comes pre-formatted for Mac OS X and can be reformatted for use with Windows 7. While the array comes set up as a 6 TB RAID 0 stripe set, it's possible to use it as a mirrored pair (RAID 1) of 3 TB drives. For those who are looking for redundant storage, the RAID 1 solution makes a lot of sense. If it's raw storage capacity that you want, RAID 0 is the way you'll want to go -- just be sure to buy a second array for backup purposes.
To see how the My Book Studio Edition II array stood up during our tests, turn to the next page.
Build Quality
To build a $550 RAID 0 array, something had to give, and in my opinion it's in the build quality of the My Book Studio Edition II. While other array providers use metal cases, WD chose to use silver-colored plastic.
When I tried to open the top of the array to see how the drives were arranged, I ran into my first issue. The user manual, which I chose to download from Western Digital's website instead of pulling off of the CD, showed that to pop open the top of the array I just needed to push down on the top front cover with my thumb until it sprung a latch and the cover popped up. I had to supply a tremendous amount of force before I was able to get the latch to release.
The individual 3 TB drives are held securely in the case in a pair of metal adapters topped with a small cover plate held in by a thumb screw. Removing the cover plate gives you access to the drives, which have a plastic tab attached to them for removal. Other arrays tested by TUAW in the past used a spring-type mechanism that popped the drive out after pushing in on the drive or moving a handle. My concern with the plastic tabs is that they seem flimsy and could easily rip off if pulled with enough force.
After pulling out the drives and replacing them, I found it almost impossible to get the plastic cover to latch properly and I needed to apply a lot of pressure to stay closed. Western Digital should consider replacing this hinge-and-latch cover with a slide off top cover or some other means of accessing the drives.
The array features Western Digital's trademark glowing white stripe on the front. When the array is busy, the stripe is animated. What I find disconcerting is that the stripe occasionally "blinks," even when nothing seems to be happening. For some reason, it seemed to draw my attention to the drive since I was wondering what was going on. Installing Western Digital's Drive Manager application enabled a capacity meter function with the stripe, turning it into a visual indication of how much capacity is being used.
The My Book Studio Edition II is surprisingly quiet, which is nice in an office environment. It also stayed quite cool during testing.
Software
The CD that comes with the My Book Studio Edition II comes with documentation and three apps: WD Drive Manager, WD Anywhere Backup and WD +TURBO Installer. I could find nothing in the documentation about the +TURBO Installer, so I took a chance and double-clicked the installer icon. What I found is that this appears to be a WD-specific IEEE 1394 (FireWire) driver. Installation requires a reboot of your Mac. Tests were performed both with and without the +TURBO feature enabled, and it appeared to improve performance slightly.
Performance
While other drives usually show rotation speed in the specifications, there is no published speed for the Caviar Green drives. They use something called Intellipower to minimize power usage by the drive, which Western Digital refers to as "a fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate, and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance."
As usual, and I'm sure I'll catch flak for this in the comments, my testing was done with a FireWire 800 connection. Unless a kindly reader would like to purchase me a Mac with an eSATA card, my future reviews of devices of this type will all be done with FireWire 800. If Apple comes out with a Thunderbolt-equipped iMac this year, I might consider getting one of those for testing.
That being said, our tests consist of copying a large file of known size to and from the drive or drive array, as well as duplicating a file on the drive. This is repeated to eliminate timing errors. We've been able to gather timing statistics on a number of drives, so the tests give a good indication of relative speed between similar products. Here are the results for several other drives and arrays compared with the My Book Studio Edition II:
Write file to drive
OWC Pro Dual mini SSD (RAID 0, FW 800): 26.3 seconds
WiebeTech RTX220-QR (RAID 1, FW 800): 26.1 seconds
WiebeTech RTX220-QR (RAID 0, FW 800): 26.0 seconds
WiebeTech RTX220-QR (RAID 0, FW 800): 25.5 seconds (cache flushing enabled)
CRU-DataPort ToughTech Duo QR (RAID 1, FW 800): 25.5 seconds
CRU-DataPort ToughTech Duo QR (RAID 0, FW 800): 26.1 seconds
WD My Book Studio Edition II (RAID 0, FW 800): 31.1 seconds
WD My Book Studio Edition II (RAID 0, FW 800, +TURBO): 28.6 seconds
WD My Book Studio Edition II (RAID 1, FW 800): 34.2 seconds
Read file from drive
OWC Pro Dual mini SSD (RAID 0, FW 800): 20.7 seconds
WiebeTech RTX220-QR (RAID 1, FW 800): 21.3 seconds
WiebeTech RTX220-QR (RAID 0, FW 800): 22.3 seconds
WiebeTech RTX220-QR (RAID 0, FW 800): 21.1 seconds (cache flushing enabled)
CRU-DataPort ToughTech Duo QR (RAID 1, FW 800): 22.5 seconds
CRU-DataPort ToughTech Duo QR (RAID 0, FW 800): 22.2 seconds
WD My Book Studio Edition II (RAID 0, FW 800): 22.0 seconds
WD My Book Studio Edition II (RAID 0, FW 800, +TURBO): 20.5 seconds
WD My Book Studio Edition II (RAID 1, FW 800): 23.1 seconds
Duplicate file on drive
OWC Pro Dual mini SSD (RAID 0, FW 800): 46.6 seconds
WiebeTech RTX220-QR (RAID 1, FW 800): 50.4 seconds
WiebeTech RTX220-QR (RAID 0, FW 800): 45.2 seconds
WiebeTech RTX220-QR (RAID 0, FW 800): 45.2 seconds (cache flushing enabled)
CRU-DataPort ToughTech Duo QR (RAID 1, FW 800): 44.9 seconds
CRU-DataPort ToughTech Duo QR (RAID 0, FW 800): 58.1 seconds
WD My Book Studio Edition II (RAID 0, FW 800): 61.7 seconds
WD My Book Studio Edition II (RAID 0, FW 800, +TURBO): 56.8 seconds
WD My Book Studio Edition II (RAID 1, FW 800): 59.8 seconds
As you can see from the read test results, the WD My Book Studio Edition II array with the +TURBO mode enabled in a RAID 0 configuration was the fastest FireWire 800 drive we've tested so far. It wasn't by much, just 0.2 seconds, but that's still not bad for a "cheap" drive array. In the write test, the array came out in the middle of the pack with +TURBO enabled, and the array lagged behind all other drives or arrays tested in the duplicate test.
Conclusion
Probably the most amazing feature of the Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II 6 TB array is the price. Even if it's being used as a RAID 0 mirrored array with 3 TB of capacity, the $550 price point is incredible for what it delivers.
While those who are looking for a fast drive array for video editing will probably want to look elsewhere (probably towards the new Thunderbolt arrays that are starting to appear), the My Book Studio Edition II array is definitely worth a look from anyone who is searching for an inexpensive mass storage solution.
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It's a great time to be in the market for mass storage for your Mac. Hardware manufacturers keep coming out with new solutions that...
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Looked at one. Build quality is comparable to the price.
I don't really understand the need for large drives and RAID. Most drive space is driven by video and, to a lesser extent, audio. For the amount of change that takes place in those applications, drag and drop, or SuperDuper! work just fine.
No fans though, for video that's a plus.
...and then our kids will laugh at us when seeing the pictures of how big 6TB were when juggling cheap micro SD-like 1TB cards.
April 16 2011 at 2:41 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI stick to QNAP boxes these days. They come with a solid OS and the units are fairly inexpensive. Just load em up with the drives of your choice.
April 16 2011 at 5:17 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Replyso weird to see all these comments complaining about WD but praising LaCie.
my experiences have been completely opposite - i've had 2 LaCies fail that i replaced with 2 WD MyBooks and the WDs are still working.....
I have the 2x1tb version of this drive and have had no problems except for one thing - Time Machine doesn't like to write to it if it's hooked up via USB to my Airport Extreme.
I can access it through Finder and read/write no problem, and if I plug in directly via FW there's no problem.
Anyone else have this issue?
I'm done with WD drives. I've got too many dead one units littering the place. I've had drives and power supplies fail. I'm back to buying LaCie units.
While 6tb sounds great - what happens when it fails? Where do you back up a 6 tb drive?
Nice review, thanks for the info. This is a tempting package.
I will say that while I understand your eSata woes, I also see why you get the comments about it. SSD-anything should be way faster than these spinning platters. Your read & write values are, for the most part, clustered so tightly that it's hard not to suspect you're measuring FW800 more than anything else.
I've bought WD drives for years, and every Black Friday when Target or Wal-Mart puts one on sale ( either Elements or Passport) I go pick one up.
The last WD drive that failed on me was a first gen WD Elements 500GB
HD from 2007. It failed last September (2010) after hosting at near 90%
capacity my iTunes library, so it constantly got r/w, as my wife kept adding and organizing the library over that three year period.
It went out 2 weeks before the warranty was up, and I replaced it
with a 1TB Caviar Blue from WD for less the cost of what I paid
for the drive on BF 2007.
Swapped the drive in the case, rebooted the Mac it was attached to,
and volia, it's back in service.
I had a convo with someone who perfers Seagates, instead of WD drives.
I've had 3 bad Seagates out the the box, but no bad WD drives,
other than the one that failed after 3 years of constant use.
His experience was about the same ( 3 WD failed out the box, one Seagate died after 2.5 yrs of service). YMMV.
I've read so many bad things about WD drives, but I haven't hardly experienced all the bad luck others have.
In my closet I have one 250GB WD from late 2009 with a red X on it (my mark of its failure). It might've been from a 20" alu iMac but I can't remember.
On the flip side:
• that alu iMac has had a 1TB WD in it for the last two years
• I have an old 80GB My Book (the one with the green ring) connected to an iMac G4 for backup
• I have a 500GB WD My Book for storage (blue bar)
• a 1TB WD My Book for Time Machine
• and lastly, an ancient version of the Studio Edition, 1TB that I got for $400+ 3-4 years ago. It's loud as hell and the spin-up after sleep is annoyingly hesitant, but it's still working. Though to err on caution, I just bought a current 1TB My Book (white bar) (then disabled that annoying SmartWare partition) to replace the aging Studio drive
So for me, not including the newest drive, that's at least a 5/1 success rate with WD drives. Excluding the one internal drive, that's 100% operating success over multiple years.
Before getting the WD 1TB for the alu iMac I installed a 1TB Seagate which had crippling firmware problems when working with Mac or something, so screw that one. I also have a collection of 2.5" Mac laptop drives, 2 Seagate and 1 Hitachi. One or two of them are dead, the other's just no longer used (probably replaced with a WD). I have a PowerBook G4 with its original 80GB, and that's either Hitachi or WD.
It makes me wonder just what in the world is happening to those whose WD drives go bad on them...
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TUAW (or The Unofficial Apple Weblog) is a website devoted to tips, reviews, news, analysis and opinion on everything Apple.
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