Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition 2TB June 18th, 2008 | by Josh Norem
Full Review
Features and Design The Mirror Edition is USB only, so if you’re an eSATA or FireWire enthusiast you’re out of luck. It’s possible those versions may be forthcoming from WD, but our guess is the company stuck with USB only to keep the cost down. Also, we received a 2TB (terabyte) version to review, but WD is also selling a 1TB version as well that costs $289.99 USD. If you simply do not care about a backup drive that uses RAID 1 (mirroring) technology and would prefer a faster transfer rate, we recommend the Western Digital Studio Edition II drive which features high-speed FireWire 800 and eSATA interfaces; sans RAID 1 capabilities. The package includes the drive itself, power cable, USB cable, quick setup guide and a software CD. The software CD includes WD Anywhere Backup, (which is essentially Memeo backup), a Memeo AutoSync trial, MioNet trial and Google software. Our review unit features two 1TB Western Digital 7200rpm hard drives, and they are the company’s green variety that offer reduced power consumption. With the Mirror Edition WD has implemented a quick removal option for the drives that will be a blessing to anyone who has ever had an external drive fail, as they are notoriously difficult to pry open to remove the drive. On this particular drive, you just apply pressure to the top of the drive and the grill lifts up. Then you twist a thumbscrew of sorts loose and lift it away, and each drive has a small, plastic handle you can use to remove the drive from the chassis.
The My Book Mirror Edition shares the same Knight Rider inspired design with its My Book brethren, including the Home Edition model we reviewed recently. It’s solid black, glossy, with a cool blue LED light that displays the capacity of the drive as well as array status, making it easy to check on things at a glance.
The My Book Mirror Edition contains two drives that can mirror each other, or be striped to achieve full capacity of both drives.
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by Norman Sanders on September 5, 2008:
“If you like to control your environment and validate that you have backups, better to buy two separate drives and use a third party synch program. With this system, you have to just make a leap of faith that what you have on the second half of your system...” More...