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

Nothing new to add here except to balance the 5 star reviews with my 2 star-- and to warn those Mac users who think it won't happen to you-- don't buy this drive-- it will happen to you too, just as it did me. Same problem not re-mounting after sleep. Doesn't do it all the time-- just sometimes. Too bad, otherwise a good drive, but it is getting to be a pain having to reach over and plug/unplug to get it to remount.

I'm a graphic designer looking for a good repository for graphic flies, records, data, whatever. I highly recommend this product. It's plug and play. The only thing I have a small problem with is preparing it so the 2 TB drive is actually a dually mirrored drive (I TB with ITB instantaneous backup). For instance even if you hit the right buttons it's difficult to know if you've done just what you set out to do. However I can't fault Western Digital for a fine product. I have a 500 Gb backup for my Mac Time Machine materials, and I use it for the Mac Backups as well. My 2 TB My Book I use for live files. Put it this way, if you have a Mac, don't want to play around with a lot of headaches, want to have a quiet and secure spot for files...you couldn't do any better than with this.

One thing. I hook up via Firewire, not USB. There is an annoying feature that a WD hard drive can go to sleep on you and this will affect your Mac. Or perhaps it's the Mac going to sleep and not the WD drive. I've turned off sleep on the Mac and I'll still notice that sometimes the WD shows on the desktop but you can't reach it. This requires a bit of fiddling around to fix (the easiest being rebooting). WD does point out that Firewire devices can have a glitch with a Mac due to it's sleep feature. It's a pain, but it's not bad. That's why I can't give this 5 stars.

I purchased this drive to use as a backup for my art, music, and photographs. I am using it in its mirror configuration. My systems has 2TB of drives and this brings the total to 3TB. It is more than half full already :-). The only problem I encountered was not being able to share the drive on my office network. Unfortunately Western Digital did not have a solution but I did find a solution on the internet. My server is running XP and I had to set a registry value (IRPStackSize) to 20.
I have several Western Digital drives and have never had a problem with any of them. Some have been running non stop for more than 3 years now.

I am currently using it via USB and will soon use it as an e-sata device, as soon as I get some cables.

If you need secure storage this drive delivers!

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

I bought this product mainly for the redundancy feature. I've got the drive configured to run RAID 1 over a USB2 connection. It is connected to a 2009 Mac Mini which I use as a media pc. The drive is used mainly as a fileserver/backup and the main source for my videos, pictures and music. It takes the drive 4-6 seconds to come out of sleep mode. This is a little annoying but not a show stopper.

From reading the other reviews, the very first thing I did when the drive arrived was upgrade the firmware and download the new DriveManager software from WD.

My major disappointment is around FW800 issues. Initially, when I plug the drive in via FW800 to my 2009 Mac Mini there is a significant increase in read & write throughput over USB2. Eventually performance degrades (usually after the drive goes to sleep and wakes a few times) and eventually it becomes unusable to play video's off of. When using the FW connection, I've had issues where the drive has locked up finder, the drive has disconnected (without properly unmounting) and my Mini has even crashed and rebooted. When connected via USB2 I haven't had any issues at all.

I called WD support about the FW issues and their advice was:
1. try a different FW port, sorry the mini only has 1 FW800 port.
2. try a different cable, The only FW800 cable I have is the one that came with the drive.

Since the product works initially when plugged in over FW, I don't think I've got a hardware issue, I think this has to do with software. I'm not sure if the bug is on WD's firmware or in OSX. Hopefully it will get ironed out with a future software update.

Bottom line, if you don't need the FW800 functionality right now, it's not a bad drive.