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

I was a little apprehensive about buying this external hard drive because of the issues staying connected via Firewire. Well it does drop offline on occasion with Firewire or USB. (However I find this is normal with all USB/Firewire hard drive I have owned). I use my 2009 Mac Mini strictly as a music server and hooking up to eSata proved to be as reliable as my internal Super Talent Ultradrive SSD drive I added. To add eSata to the Mac Mini I removed the internal ROM drive an added a special Sata to eSata chassis cable. (Buy them at CPU Stuff dot com, item SKU: ESATABKTM8I)The sata end of the cable has to be secured with a dab of silicone as the internal ROM drive uses a Slim Sata connection. (I now use and external USB Blue Ray drive) I then used a Dremmal Cutting Wheel to cut out the area where the Kennsington Lock was. Next I modified the plastic chassis mount end of the eSata adapter cable to fit in this new hole. The Mac Mini case comes apart easily with a pizza cutter, forget the putty knives other people suggest. When you put the Mini back together the top of the case pinches the modifed eSata connection and holds it securely. Nice!

Hooking up the My Book Studio Edition RAID 1 with eSata is the only way to get a totally reliable and fast hard drive connection for secure music storage. To bad Mac doesn't offer this connection standard on their computers. You need to buy your own eSata cable as it is not included with the Studio Edition. My Mac Mini Music Server works awesome.

I have the 4TB version of this enclosure. I would like to warn all prospective buyers of this product that it is not a professionally made piece of kit by any means.
Firstly I bought this drive specifically to use via eSATA and expresscard 34 port on my shiny new 17" macbook pro unibody (which rocks incidently!). The eSATA port on the back of the enclosure is really flimsy - I had to physically hold the esata cable forcefully into the socket for the drive to mount - as soon as I stopped pushing the connection would be lost - and I would get the "unsafe device removal message". There was also a lovely electrical crackling sound as the cable swam around inside of the WD eSATA port! Tried a different eSATA cable to not effect. SO I am now using the drive via FW800....

Secondly I have had the same problems as noted by the other reviews, with the drive unmounting itself. Which is related to the power saving features of the drives- features which you cannot turn off! AS I write this my WD studio edition II is sitting infront of me - and will not mount - just like the other reviewers have noted, you have to unplug all the cables and wait for the drive to forget itself and then try and remount. The drive is the only thing yet that has crashed my lovely new Macbook Pro, three times now I have had the mac equivalent of the Blue screen of death- with the dark curtain descending over the screen and the multilingual OS X message "your MAc need to be shut down NOW!....

I am a professional photographer and cannot waste my valuable time waiting for badly designed pieces of technology. We all spend too much time in front of computers as is - I assure you that if you buy one of these drives at some point you will be wasting precious time waiting for this drive to find itself!!!!

Lucky I have found a solution- I am removing the drives from the enclosure and putting them into a Guardian Maximus from OWC - these enclosures actually work.

PROFESSIONALS AVOID THE WD STUDIO EDITION II ENCLOSURES AT ALL COSTS

After almost two months now, this drive has performed without problem. I have an iMac G5 w/ a 250gb HD. I've also backed up an external Western Digital 500MB My Book, and a large number of video files. This did take time (I still have 1.3TBs left!), but after the initial backup it does a good job of keeping up w/changes. I had some concerns about heat while it did the bulk of the copying, but on a daily basis it hasn't been a problem. As for noise, it has no fan, and other than start-up and searching sounds the spinning platter occasionally makes, it's a very quiet unit. I do wish the backup software allowed you to scheduled backups at specific intervals, since the immediate backup procedure can interfere with processor use and slow things down. I finally realized that instead of unmounting the disc if I didn't want this to happen, I could just pause backups for a period of time, and then have it resume (easy do accomplish with the "anywhere backup" menu icon's dropdown menu). Oh, -- the "Power/Activity LED Light" is pretty cool, but it's mostly eye candy. It could be helpful, but w/seven different patterns, plan on keeping the manual sheet handy so that you can figure out which pattern goes with each "drive state."

I bought this external hard drive three weeks ago. It was delivered on time and there was absolutely no issues regarding shipment (as is the usual for shopping with Amazon).
Although the drive is supposed to be an Apple-drive it was easily formatted and attached to my Windows Vista Ultimate system via eSATA. Both USB and IEEE1394 is way too slow so eSATA is a very nice option from Western Digital.
I've ripped my DVD collection and even though I have more than 200 DVDs on this drive I still have abt. 1TB left of space ;-)
I will not hessitate recommending this drive for anyone with the need for massive external storage!

I have been using this drive for a couple of months with windows XP using USB2 without any problems. Installation went fine and I see no slowing down of the computer.
I am recording HD TV continuasly in the background while I am using the computer. I can even use Media player without any gliches at the same time.
Only the price kept me from giving it 5 stars.