Western Digital My Book Studio II – 4TB USB 2.0/FireWire 400/800/eSATA Desktop External Hard WDH2Q40000N

3 Comments

1. Raffaello says:

   May 4, 2010 at 1:15 am

   This review is from: Western Digital My Book Studio II – 2 TB (2 x 1 TB) USB 2.0/FireWire 400/800/eSATA Desktop External Hard Drive WDH2Q20000N (Electronics)

   I have been using the WD Studio II 2TB on my 2008 iMac OSX 10.5.6 for two weeks. Connection: firewire 800. Today, it did not mount when I booted the computer.
   Checked the WD Website Knowledge Base.

   Discovered two things:

   1. Knowledge Base Answer 1697: “This issue is caused by the external hard drive’s built in auto on/off functionality not correctly receiving a command from the computer system to wake from a power saver mode.”

   Why does the auto on/off functionality not correctly receive the command from the computer system? WD goes on to suggest installing their WD Drive Manager.
   Well, WD Drive Manager is already installed, how else could a user have arrived at this impasse to begin with?
   And then they suggest to dismount the drive. How do you dismount an unmounted drive?

   2. Knowledge Base Answer 1680: “This is an technical limitation between the FireWire interfaces on the Macintosh computer and the external hard drive.”

   By “the external hard drive” WD means THEIR brand of external hard drive. I have never had this specific problem with any other brands of external hard drives connected to my Macintosh computer.
   When is WD going to fix this “technical limitation” that they have built into their Studio II external hard drive? I would say, that is a pretty serious “technical limitation.”
   1680 goes on to explain the workaround solution, essentially a routine disconnecting the power cable and reconnecting. Nice.

   My hope is that this entire situation is the result of following the apparently misleading instructions shown in the Studio II manual: chapter 7, “Turning Off/Disconnecting the Device.”
   Since “Auto-off” is the first entry in this chapter, it leads the user to believe that this is the preferred way to operate the drive. Guess not: as it turns out, the hidden “technical limitation” of the firewire connection will eventually cause the problem I have described. I suppose I can’t rely on “Auto-off.” Use “Safe Shutdown” only, even though the instructions in the manual differ from the instructions presented in WD Knowledge Base Answer 976!
   And, speaking of conflicting instructions, compare WD Knowledge Base Answer 1386 with the Auto-off instructions in the manual.

   Based on all of this information from WD, conflicting and otherwise, my guess is that the Auto-off feature is problematic (at least with Macintosh computers) because of firewire “technical limitations” caused by the WD external drive design. This fact, if it is a fact, should be expressed clearly in the manual.
2. Jago says:

   May 4, 2010 at 2:34 am

   This review is from: Western Digital My Book Studio II – 2 TB (2 x 1 TB) USB 2.0/FireWire 400/800/eSATA Desktop External Hard Drive WDH2Q20000N (Electronics)

   If you want the best performance, you would want to use it as eSATA. This would mean a cardbus or expresscard eSATA adaptor on a laptop, for example. But here is the one star that I have taken off: at this price, it still does not come with an eSATA cable! It has cables for USB and the 1394, but no eSATA. I have not had the chance to test it in eSATA because of the cable. The USB2 speed is good enough for my archival application. I’ve also read around and eSATA is not faster than USB2 by much in real life (maybe 25MB/s vs 30MB/s).

   The 5 year warranty is industry standard and is reassuring. And by the time it’s up, you will want a larger storage anyway. But you must keep in mind that that if the controller in the enclosure dies, your whole array dies. Hopefully the controller didn’t write bogus information into your harddrives and then hopefully WD will be able to ship you a new enclosure and you can recover that way. (This is the one weakness of having RAID 1 as the only copy. Be ware: a faulty controller can corrupt your data or even wipe your drives clean. Don’t let that be your only copy.)

   Cost-wise, each of its 1TB harddrives retails at about 180 as of this writing and you still need two enclosures to mount them externally. That means you are paying 470 – 2*180 = 110 for WD’s own enclosure. It may still sound like a lot for an enclosure but the pros of this one outweight the cost and cons:

   - The enclosure does RAID 1 (mirroring) in its hardware, no real cons here as long as 1TB+1TB mirroring is good enough for your application.

   - Fanless: Less noise and it’s really silent, but it also runs rather warm even with air conditioning. I do note that there is a temperature sensor that will stop the drives when overheated. So there is technically no worry, unless the temperature sensor itself dies… And being fanless is what makes the 5yr warranty even better. I’ve replaced one too many fans in my enclosures. (Many fans die within 3 years…)

   - Self-rebuilds: After replacing a drive, it will rebuild in several hours. Good: completely automatic. Bad: it does this offline so the data is not accessible while rebuilding.

   - Green assembly: I should note that you can only use WD’s own “harddrive assembly” in this enclosure. You cannot (at least within the warranty’s limit) use your own harddrives, not even WD Green Series retail ones since they do not come with the assembly hardware. See the manual if in doubt.

   In all, highly recommended if the capacity suits your need.