Western Digital ups My Book Studio hard-drive capacity to 4TB
The My Book Studio II.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)A while ago, Western Digital announced new lines of My Book single volume external hard drives that offer 2TB of storage. It was only a matter of time before the company introduced its new dual-drive My Book Studio Edition II external hard drive with 4TB of storage.
The new drive, like its previous versions, is designed to work with Mac computers and comes with most connection options found in an external hard drive. The My Book Studio Edition II comes with USB 2.0, FireWire, and eSATA and is preformatted for Macs and compatible with Time Machine, the automatic backup solution of OS 10.5 or later.
The My Book Studio Edition II's internal hard drives are configured in RAID 0, which offers high performance and a large amount of storage. There's a catch though, with this configuration: if one of the hard drives fails, you'll also lose data on the other drive. WD is, however, very sure about its product and back the My Book Studio Edition II with a generous five-year warranty. The warranty, of course, only covers the hardware, not the data stored on it.
For this reason, the external drive works better as a backup drive or a drive that contains data backed up somewhere else. According to Western Digital, thanks to its performance, the My Book Studio Edition II is best used for video and photo-editing work.
The two internal hard drives (2TB each) used in the My Book Studio Edition II are the WD's GreenPower drives that use less energy than other hard drives and offer quiet performance. The My Book design includes a nice storage gauge to show how much storage space has been occupied. The chassis can be opened in a snap, making servicing or replacing the internal hard drives an easy job. You can only use WD's GreenPower hard drives with the My Book Studio Edition II.
The My Book Studio Edition II is available now for an estimated $650.
Dong Ngo is a CNET editor who covers networking and network storage, and writes about anything else he finds interesting. You can also listen to his podcast at insidecnetlabs.cnet.com. E-mail Dong. 
