WD My Book Studio 500gb

[sneeks]

I'm considering buying one of these for use with my iMac, at £97 delivered they seem reasonable value. Has anyone here tried or own one of these and able to advise if they are reliable?

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=374

 

[David]

just ordered a 1TB one for £156. the reviews are very possitive.

 

[sneeks]

I had considered the 500GB Time Capsule from Apple but it is a rip off in comparison to the alternative options available.

I am tempted to order the 1TB drive but doubt I really need it. I've survived for 18 months with only a 250gb internal drive.

 

[FiDoDiDo]

Spoke to a mate of mine that now needs a 1Tb drive for Time Capsule instead of his 500Gb because of all the different versions it stores, so might be worth getting it in the first place.

 

[sneeks]

Time Machine may not be an issue as I'm considering rolling back to Tiger as I have found my iMac with Leopard to be running slower and with more problems than I ever had previously.

 

[FlamingMonkey]

I just bought the WD Elements drive 500GB for £65 from ebuyer.

 

[sneeks]

Whichever option I choose will preferably have a Firewire 400 port rather than only USB2.

 

[dk]

i have the WD elements 500gb one and it seems fine.

I prefer USB2 as I sometime have a problem with my DVDRW being detected withfirewire whereas USB2 never lets me and down and is faster anyway.

I'm looking to get one of the WD passport disks, they go up to 320gb now and are usb powered, so small and convenient though!

 

[Tom]

i have 2 passports

 

[sneeks]

In most of the tests I've read the firewire 400 connection is always faster in practise over USB2 on a Mac.

 

[David]

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/137327

what i'm getting...fits your bill too

 

[Mike_182]

In most of the tests I've read the firewire 400 connection is always faster in practise over USB2 on a Mac.

Limiting factor will be the HDD in the box, not the connection speed. Average HDD can't manage to fill the USB2 bus or Firewire 400 or 800...

 

[sn00p]

In most of the tests I've read the firewire 400 connection is always faster in practise over USB2 on a Mac.

Limiting factor will be the HDD in the box, not the connection speed. Average HDD can't manage to fill the USB2 bus or Firewire 400 or 800...

I agree - for non random data transfers, chuck in small "random" reads an firewire will piss all over USB all day long.

The problem with USB is that it's a really poorly designed system, nice ideas - just badly executed. The problem is exaccerbated by Microsoft whos driver model is just poor beyond belief. They tried "fixing" this with the "windows driver framework" which just builds a higher level API over the top of WDM. What they should have done is chucked WDM away and gone and looked at the way linux & bsd drivers work....

Take for example the serial CDC, which for some reason (under Windows) requires an INF file before it'll work, there is no reason why this should be! OS X & Linux both have the correct behaviour and "just work".

Try transferring small amounts of data over the bus and its transfer rate becomes horrific.

 

[KDF]

Had 3 WD Mybook 1TB's and can safely say they are the worst external drives ive ever used with the hardware raid failing and causing data loss.

I will never purchase WD stuff again.

 

[David]

nteresting, I've had a number of wd stuff and never had a problem, going for another one because of that alone

 

[sneeks]

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/137327

what i'm getting...fits your bill too

That is one of the options I am considering, still cannot decide between a 500GB or 1TB.

 

[David]

well seems liek a no brainer but if you have budgetary constraints i guess...

 

[sneeks]

I settled on the 500gb My Book Studio at £97 delivered. This is more than double the storage of my current internal HDD so will be plenty.