Home > Consumer Reviews > Western Digital My Book Studio II - 2 TB (2 x 1 TB) USB 2.0/FireWire 400/FireWire 800/eSATA Desktop External Hard Drive WDH2Q20000N

Great design; small foot print and even though the case is plastic it seems very sturdy. Very quiet. Take your pick of interface: eSATA, FW 800/FW400, USB 2.0... AND 5 yr warranty.

This drive comes out of the box Mac ready. I am using WinXP... the included SW bundle didn't seem to have any Win "setup". I had to call Tech Support and download WD Drive Manager. Once that was installed the rest of the setup was a breeze. I chose "Quick format" so it formats as you add data... instant (WD tech support told me it would take ~12 hours for a full format) and RAID1 (no sweat... easy just chooose RAID 1 or 2 from WD Drive Manager). I found that USB was too slow so I added a CardBus FW800 card (Startech CB1394B3 ), much faster now. My next laprop will be a MacBook Pro... then I will use the fastest interface... eSATA. No eSATA cable was included.

I purchased this drive to go along with my intel mac. I was previously a happy lacie owner, but since WD came in at such a great price and was listed as great with macs, I went for it.

What a mistake. For the first month, it worked well... a bit slower than my lacie, but still worked. Then, all of the sudden, it began to dismount itself from my computer. I am currently using Lightroom to edit my work, and when the drive would fail, Lightroom would loose the catalog. When you have 500+ images to edit and the drive dismounts every 45 minutes, this can become a huge issue.

So, I did some further research and found out that several other intel mac users are having the same issue with this product. This is very frustrating as it is advertised 'for your mac'. Most of the other posters mentioned that the drive worked well for about a month and then started having issues.

I called WD, and their customer service department was actually very helpful. The offered to send me a new unit, even though that unit would likely have the same issue down the line. I understand that there was not much they could do for me at WD, but they were concerned and helpful just the same.

Luckily for me, the customer service dept at Amazon is rockin' awesome and is allowing me to exchange the WD for 2 lacie units even though I am slightly past the 30 day return policy mark. While I have never had to return an item to Amazon before, I am very comforted to know that the customer service dept is really looking out for their customers.

If you are using an intel mac, I would move on from this product. It is not worth the headache. However, you can feel confident making your purchase from Amazon...

I bought this drive to serve as a backup disk for my iMac. Its working great, and the large capacity allows for "longer" range of backup..
I can go back over amonth and restore files long lost.

First one, right out of the box, the case would not close. Contacted WD warranty repair and they sent a second one. They were very quick. I had to pay for return shipping. This case will close, but the power button doesn't work properly.

I have it connected to my iMac via firewire 800 for speed. This connection has a "glitch" that does not allow the the unit to properly receive the "hibernate" command from the computer, so it will turn itself off to save power. This unmounts it from OSX. It is lost to the computer and you must use the power button to turn it back on.....and my power button doesn't work well. Time machine and Itunes don't like to look for nonexistent drives. Found a script on the internet from some wonderful people that pings the disk every 9 minutes. Here's the link "http://macscripter.net/viewtopic.php?id=27687&action=new" . Works great, drive stays on and firewire800 is really fast.

Drive is very quite and heat load is really small. These are the features I like most in the iMac. If you are going to open the case, you have to press really, really hard on the front edge of the top panel straight up from the Cylon bar. I don't think you should have these problems when you buy a "premium" product.

After reading a lot of conflicting reviews I went ahead and purchased it. Set-up was really not plug n'play as the WD drive manager had to be installed and conversion via that to a RAID1 (mirror drive) was almost too swift. Unless the WD manager is lying I now have 1TB of Time Machine storage that is being backed up on the second 1TB drive. I'm not using the WD back-up software. I did install WD firewire turbo drivers. I hope I don't live to regret that if a future OS version breaks the drive. I used to us SCSSI on pre-OSX Macs and every OS upgrade broke the drive until the SCSSI drive manufacturer or RAID software company updated the drivers. I hope that won't be the case here. If Snow Leopard doesn't break it I'll be very pleased ;)

I'm giving it four stars now as it is working on a MacPro via firewire 800 and Time Machine with no problems. Note if you go e-SATA WD warns against the use of Sonnet PCI cards. I plan to go e-SATA as soon I can identify a card that will work well with it.

I'd like to buy a second one and run it through my Airport Extreme for a network back-up server via USB for the rest of the family.