Western Digital "My Book" Hits Terabyte Sizes

Western Digital's line of external USB/Firewire hard disks has crossed over into the land of terabytes. They announced today that the new My Book Pro Edition II will support up to one terabyte (1,000 GB) of hard disk storage. If that sounds puzzling, given the current paucity of 1TB hard drives, be reassured: this My Book holds two hard drives, and 500GB drives are certainly available at the moment.

Raw capacity is not the only selling point for the My Book Pro Edition II -- it also supports RAID 0 and RAID 1. The RAID 0 setting lets you interleave I/O to the two hard drives, for faster reading and writing times. You can choose safety over speed with the RAID 1 setting, which mirrors the two drives so that all data is written to both drives and a single drive failure causes no loss of data.

A thousand gigabytes of storage might sound excessive if you're thinking about text documents, or even high-resolution photographs. But if once you look at storage-hungry applications like video editing or even just log analysis for a high-traffic website, a terabyte becomes less excessive sounding.

As with previous incarnations of "My Book", the My Book Pro Edition II includes a SmartPower feature that turns the device on and off with the computer, and a Safe Shutdown feature to help ensure any cached data is flushed to the drive before it's shut down. The bundled software is EMC Retrospect Express version 7.5 backup and system recovery package. Mac users can use the Firewire interface for bootable disaster recovery.

The device retails for $549, and includes a three-year warranty (that is not voided by adding or replacing hard drives inside the device).

See Also

• The Western Digital My Book Pro Edition II press release.

October 16, 2006October