Western Digital's My Book getting a 1TB Pro II Edition?

You won't find this on Western Digital's site yet, but eagle-eyed tipster Scott, came across this unannounced 1TB My Book Pro II Edition external storage solution while shopping Provantage. This is a dual-drive system so we're looking at a couple of 500GB drives spinning at 7200RPM packed in a bulls-eye tome with Firewire 400 / 800 and USB 2.0 interfaces. Features include RAID 0/1, backup and recovery software, and 3 year warranty for $513.49, exactly. Sorry, no product image, but other than a color change, the Pro II isn't likely to differ from the existing My Book lineup pictured. No reason to doubt this is coming, it's gonna happen sooner or later.

Update: Yup, it's the real deal, and reader Michael G. was kind enough to direct us the 1TB MyBook's Buy.com page. As we suspected, it looks pretty much the same as the less capacious versions, although this new "book" is so fat that it seems WD is really stretching the whole attempt at literary camoflauge it's got going on here.

[Thanks, Scott]

[eric f @ Sep 29th 2006 10:36AM]

At FW800, The Mybook is very unimpressive. This comes from personal experience and Xbench results compared to Lacie FW800 and my internal SATA drives. The benchmarks change very little when you use the FW800 vs. FW400. Obviously a result of slow stock WD drives.

[Jeremy @ Sep 29th 2006 11:06AM]

eric, I'm not sure what's wrong with your setup, but my MyBook Pro is twice as fast in sequential read/write tests when using FW800 over FW400. It also nudges out my internal SATA drives by a hair. Also tested with Xbench.

[strider_mt2k @ Sep 29th 2006 10:48AM]

A buddy of mine just bought two My Book drives for his studio.
He seems to think HD archiving is a good idea!

I dunno personally. I think they're as susceptible to the same things as any other HD.

Beats making a ton of DVDs I suppose, but I like that option a little better.

[OtakuCODE @ Sep 29th 2006 10:54AM]

The 1TB capacity I can definitely see. But RAID 0/1? I was excited when I saw this, as I'd love to have a fault tolerant external storage solution that didn't cost a mint. So I went to WDs site. I don't really need 500GB of space, so I figured I'd find one of the smaller models. As it turns out though, not a single one of the models of the MyBook I could find mentioned anything at all about RAID support. Is the RAID 0/1 support new to the Pro II line? If so, I hope they come out with a 500GB (250GB using RAID 1) version... I could use 250GB of fault-tolerant external storage.

[Alex @ Sep 29th 2006 11:36AM]

This really isn't something new. WD is simply hopping onto the bandwagon that Maxtor and Lacie have already jumped on with dual drive external hard drives (One Touch III / Big Disk Extreme). Let's hope WD's reliability carries with them, because Lacie's dual disk line is known to be unreliable, whereas the One Touch III has a very high cost (with the Oxford 924 Firewire chipset I believe = awesome performance). Definitely will keep my eyes peeled for this baby.

[tpp @ Sep 29th 2006 2:08PM]

Maybe I'm just not geeky enough, but my main reason for purchasing a My Book drive (500GB Pro Edition) instead of any of the other ones was the design of the My Book product line.

It just looks much better than the competitors.

We'll see how reliable the thing is in a year or two, I suppose, but I suspect it's about as reliable as the competitors. The price was similar enough to the competitors that the design was basically what it boiled down to when I made the final decision on what to buy. I bought the device primarily for backup purposes, so I'm not really concerned about if it reads a 100GB file 20 seconds slower than the competitors. That wouldn't make any difference to me.

I'll also be buying the 160GB Western Digigal Passport external HDD for the same reason.

[Q DuB @ Sep 29th 2006 6:15PM]

Making a WD 1TB is a bad idea. I've had two of them and had trouble with both of them. I take good care of my electronics, and they have failed on me both times. The hardware is not reliable, period.

[Wonderboy @ Oct 2nd 2006 10:16AM]

Q DuB - There is someone like you out there for every single hard drive ever made. "I had so many problems with this company, stay away!!!"

Fact is, hard drives (in their current form) will never be fail-proof. The read-arm is hovering minute distances from the fragile data platter... all manufacturers are going to have defective pieces.

The key is to look at the over-all reputation. No, it's not a guarantee that the HDD won't fail on you, but it gives you better chances.

WD has a great reputation... maybe not the absolute best (I'm not sure, so I won't say), but they have a great reputation.

Plus, add on top of that, this external enclosure is "sexy" when compared to most other enclosures.

[David L @ Nov 9th 2006 10:45PM]

I recently Bought the Wd Mybook Pro II through a vendor.. Ok at first i was impressed .. good speeds and all that.. but i got looking into a problem im seeing. The site says formated space is like 1023 gigs ok fine. I formated NTFS and i see 931.51GB's as total drive ( raid 0 ) space w/ 920GB's available. Anyone else have this problem. Im confussed here.

[Tal @ Nov 11th 2006 5:53AM]

What about its noisiness / quietness? Some people in other sites said a few things about it being too noisy. How do you find it?

Thanks

[Gary @ Feb 2nd 2007 5:56PM]

I just got the My Book 1 TB hard drive, and I'm quite disappointed with it. The thing is so loud that it's useless for doing any video/audio editing. I have to crank the speakers way up to hear my video over the sound of the hard drive. It also seems quite hot compared to a couple older LaCie (500GB) drives that I have. Also, without touching anything, it ejecting itself off of the desktop of the computer, so I have to reboot the computer to get it back. I don't know if I got a lemon, or if anyone else has experienced the same things that I have. I'm sending it back.

[German @ Apr 25th 2007 9:40AM]

Bad product.. have a lot of network problems... it works fine a couple of houre.. but sudenly.. it fails.. i cant access the drive.. i can make pings to my drive... but cant access the drive neither the web page.