Western Digital unveils 2TB My Book family

You may be familiar with Western Digital's My Book family of external hard drives. A popular example is the My Book Essential Edition that offers up to 1TB of storage.

The company announced Wednesday that it has expanded the My Book family of external hard drives to include a 2TB capacity, currently the largest capacity available in a single-drive storage device.

The updated My Book family is compatible with Macs and PCs and comes in four models: My Book Studio Edition, My Book Mac Edition, My Book Home Edition, and My Book Essential Edition.

All these models share the same 2TB capacity and the USB 2.0 connection available in the My Book Essential edition. However, the other models also offer FireWire 400, FireWire 800, and eSATA interfaces for faster data transfer rates. The My Book Home Edition is also equipped with continuous backup software for PC users who need an easy way to back up data.

(Credit: Western Digital)

Common features of the entire family of the new My Book external hard drives include:

• Elegant, small footprint design
• Capacity gauge to see at a glance how much capacity is available on the drive (not available on the My Book Essential Edition drive)
• Environmentally friendly design that saves power by going into standby mode after 10 minutes of inactivity
• SmartPower features that turns the drive on and off with the computer and Safe Shutdown that prevents the drive from being powered down until all the data has been written
• Kensington Security Slot that lets users secure the drive to their desk

Except for the My Book Mac Edition, which is available next month, the rest of the new My Book family is available now at retailers and cost between $329.99 and $379.99, depending on model and capacity.

[jonnybrady]

I would NEVER buy another Western Digital hard disk as long as I live! I had two 500GB 'My Book' hard disks and both of them failed on me within a year! They were bought a month apart from different retailers and they hadn't received any knocks, they were connected to my machine and just sat on a shelf, but yet they still managed to fail.

Also when I contacted Western Digital about getting them replaced I had a really hard time, they ignored e-mails and when I finally did get a response they weren't willing to help me out and didn't really care that I'd lost a lot of data or that the hard disks were within their warranty period.

[laidbackinhawaii]

I agree Jonny. I have my WD hard disk for 2 years now and it's been acting really slow and it had only used a quarter of the disk. I lost a lot of files - important ones too. I don't trust this brand at all.