Home > Consumer Reviews > My Book Studio Edition WDH1Q10000 - Hard drive - 1 TB - external - FireWire / FireWire 800 / Hi-Speed USB / eSATA-300

This was a great product until most of my applications started to hung.
I thought it was because of OSX , so I reinstalled everything.
Same crap. I just unplugged everything from my computer, and everything worked great. Little by little, I plugged back all external HD I had, until it was the MyBook turn. Application hunging came back ! From my researches (thanks to the guys at #macosx@undernet.org channels), it looks like it is the enclosure of the HD. If you are going to use an external hard drive, you want to be sure that the enclosure will use OXFORD chips. Not like this one. GREAT HD, but not for OS X !

I have the exact same problem as the previous reviewer. The drive hangs up and freezes the Mac (Mini Mac running Leopard); and the Mac is indeed "too stupid" to quit trying. I found that if I leave the computer for a few hours and come back the drive is dead and Timemachine is hung.

It can be jump started by unplugging the firewire cable AND the power cable and putting it back together. This frees up the Mac but the drive does not come back. There may be a better way but it seems I have to re-boot the Mac before the drive is recognized and shows up on the desktop again.

I found a firmware upgrade (because of Leopard) on the Western Digital website that I applied. It now hangs and freezes a little differently but in fact still hangs and freezes.

It looks good and WOULD be a great value if it worked. The bottom line is it doesn't work; so don't waste your time, skip this drive and skip the problems; Mac owners deserve better than this.

It does have Firewire 400 and 800, USB2 and eSATA and I found you could reformat it for the PC... I don't know if you'll have the same problems on the Windoze machines but why try? Just pass it up.

I purchased two of these 1TB drives late in 2007 and periodically experienced the firewire "freeze" problem. I called WD support and they knew nothing about this issue. The vendor (not Amazon) would not take them back (after 30 days) and Western Digital said they do not give refunds.

Eventually the firmware update (the reseller said one was in the works) appeared, and I applied it. I just recently put it back into Time Machine service, as another smaller drive was being used while waiting for the promised firmware update. 12 hours later, Time Machine is in the infamous eternal "Preparing..." state yet again. It doesn't complete hang the system as before, but system performance is clearly degraded.

Also note that when you plug these drives into the Firewire bus, they take fully 30 seconds to mount on the Mac. I've never seen this from any Firewire device.

The biggest irony here is that this product is targeted to and pre-formatted for the Mac.

Unfortunately I am now stuck with these drives, with the only recourse likely to keep asking for replacements, or possibly sue them for a refund in small claims court or hope for a Class Action suit.

This is a total disaster. Almost $1000 for these unreliable door stops. Do not waste your money, or return them immediately while you are still within the return period.

As a video production student, we work with and store a lot of HD video files and I needed a good external HD. Others at school had purchased this one and were happy with it so I decided to get it too.

Although its not meant (or suggested) to be portable, I need to take it from place to place with me. The plastic isn't as tough as other metal-cased external HD's but it works fine for me. I bought this case which holds the hard drive and cables perfectly: Lowepro Edit 120+ Camcorder Bag

As for its performance, it works just like I'd expect it too. Mounts fine, pretty quiet, fast transfers via FW800. I'd recommend it!

Western Digital apparently does NOT know how to write proper FireWire Drivers for their FireWire products. If you read the fine print on the Western Digital website, you will discover that ONLY TWO Western Digital FireWire products can connect to the same computer simultaneously. Nevermind that the FireWire spec is designed to accommodate up to 63 daisy-chained devices. All the other brands of FireWire products I own have NO such limitations. When I spoke to Western Digital Product Support, they were unhelpful to the point of stupidity. It seemed they had never heard of the ability to daisy chain multiple FireWire drives. They couldn't understand why someone would need to do that. Apparently they've never heard of FinalCut, PhotoShop or ProTools. Go figure.

I bought multiple MyBook Studio drives before discovering this fatal limitation. You've been warned.