Digital Trends

Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition 2TB June 18th, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Removing the Drives

If you’ve ever had to remove a drive from an external enclosure, you know they are not designed to be opened by the end-user, but not so with the Mirror Edition. To gain access to the drives you simply press on the top of the drive and it releases a latch, allowing you to lift the top off the drive. You then spin a thumbscrew of sorts to release a metal bar that holds the drives down, then lift a drive out by its little plastic handle. It works very well and is a fantastic feature; one we hope other drive manufacturers adopt in the future.

Voila! You can easily remove both drives from the My Book without any tools, which is a fantastic feature.

Conclusion 

The My Book Mirror Edition is a very good backup drive that allows users to stash all the data they want without worrying about actually backing anything up since it’s copied to both drives (if you take the RAID 1 route, which we recommend you do). Of course, if you then use the included excellent backup software you’ll have three copies of your files, which is extreme data security! Overall it’s a great drive with superb software and features, and is easily one of the best backup drives we’ve ever evaluated. Adding a high-speed interface like FireWire or eSATA would be icing on the cake, but we understand this was not added to keep the price down. If you absolutely need the high-speed interface, look at the Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II which is similiarily priced.


Pros:

• Easy to remove drives from chassis
• Great backup software
• Easy setup
• Works with Macs and PCs
• Can encrypt backups


Cons:

• Hidden software registration sticker
• USB only