You may recall in May I was the very happy recipient of a Western Digital MyBook Mirror Edition. This USB 2.0 device contains 2x 1TB Western Digital Green drives, in a delightfully styled ‘book shelf’ case. Now that I’ve been using it for a month or so, it’s time for a review!

Ignoring the initial ordering disaster, this item was delivered on time and in good condition by Amazon UK.

The Packaging

I was a little concerned about the size of that box. I had a horrible feeling the product was going to be considerably bigger than it turned out to be. Fortunately it was just typical Amazon packing methods.

Enough! I want to see the box! Show me the product!

It’s only when you open up the package, you realise just how much thought Western Digital put into the design of this little green box. I think it safe to say Amazon could have just wrapped it in paper and stuck the delivery label on it, and it would have arrived safe and sound. At the same time, in keeping with the whole “Green” thing WD has, the packaging wasn’t over the top, as you’ll see below.

You can’t actually see the drive at all in there. It’s completely surrounded by an injection-moulded plastic safety jacket that uses minimal plastic, yet keeps the drive cushioned and snugly cocooned in the box for shipping.

Aside from this firm mass of black plastic, there’s a warranty card, a software CD and a Quick-Start sheet. Still no sign of the drive, though!

Cables And Power Supply

It’s only as we crack the shell, you can finally catch a glipse of the MyBook. Inside the shell I found, besides the drive itself, a USB lead that was disappointingly short (about 3.5 feet in length), and a fairly sturdy, standard wallwort-style power supply unit. It is slightly on the wide side, so you may need to do some juggling in your power strips. There’s no way it’d squeeze in next to another wallwort unit.

Interestingly, the power supply is a one-size-fits all, in that the particular pin arrangement for your country slides and snaps into place over the wort itself. I guess this saves WD some money in having to produce and source lots of different style PSUs, and also cuts down on unnecessary use of plastics.

Initial Setup & Installation

The instructions are short and sweet, and easy to follow. They boil down to install the software on the CD and reboot your computer, before plugging the drive in. Be wary of what you install from the CD, though. The software supplied bar one item is trialware and will expire after 30 days. This unncessarily clutters your drive, and may come as a disappointment if you get used to using it and it then shuts off demanding payment. Easier to not install it in the first place. For some inexplicable reason, Western Digital also try and force the ‘Ask.com’ and Google browser plugins on you. This can be unchecked before proceeding with the installation, but it is ticked by default. Be careful! Bad, bad Western Digital.

Using The Drive

Using the MyBook is actually a pleasure. It comes pre-configured for RAID-1 mirroring, meaning that while the capacity of the system is effectively halved (from 2TB down to 1TB), your data is secured. If one drive fails out of the two, you lose nothing. Simply phone up WD and get a replacement drive, take out the dead, put in the new (a 60 second affair), and close the lid again. The MyBook will then copy everything on the still-working drive to the new one and you’re back in business and protected once more.

All this geek talk aside though, Western Digital have done a good job of hiding the technicalities and complexities of the whole RAID business from the user. It really is just “plug and play”. It shows up as another physical hard drive in My Computer, and off you go. You don’t even need any tools to replace a hard drive – just pop the lid, undo the thumb-screw plate and pull out the failed drive. Then reverse the process to replace it. Simples.

Windows XP reports an NTFS capacity of 1,000,194,015,232 bytes, or 931GB. Not quite the magical terrabyte showing up in My Computer, but close enough. Write performance is good at approximately 22MB/sec, and read performance roughly double that. The drive comes pre-formatted for Windows so there’s no hanging about there either.

Physical Dimensions & Characteristics

I think an accurate description for this thing is ‘cute’. The pulsating blue LED (think Knight Rider, here) is calming and actually serves a multitude of purposes. It signifies drive idle, drive busy, capacity and drive failure! At-a-glance identification of how well your drive is, and how much space you have. Great stuff. The actual MyBook is unobtrusive. It would blend in pretty well on a book shelf, which is precisely what the designers intended. As you can see, it’s not that much taller than my iPod Touch:

System Tray Monitoring

Western Digital have included a System Tray tool for monitoring your MyBook (or MyBooks) from your PC, should they be out of sight and you can’t see the status LED’s. A quick mouseover of the WD icon and you can easily see whether all is well:

Power Saving Irritation

If I had to pick out one thing as a negative for the MyBook, it’d be the built-in power saving. Approximately 4 minutes after no use, the drives spin down. I am sure this makes the device more earth-friendly, but the MyBook spins the drives up sequentially, and both drives must be spun up and ‘ready’ before it can service the operating system. This results in a delay of approximately 15-20 seconds before the drive can actually be used from a sleeping state. The sleep delay cannot be modified, and it is independant of your Power Options within Windows.

However! There is a workaround.

Step 1: Download “Touch for Windows” from SourceForge, and install.
Step 2: Drop the resulting ‘touch.exe’ file in C:\Windows or C:\WinNT (depending on your OS)
Step 3: Create an empty notepad document and save it to your MyBook as TouchMe.txt (e.g. D:\TouchMe.txt)
Step 4: Right click on this file and select ‘Hidden’, so it doesn’t show up under normal circumstances.
Step 5: Start > Control Panel > User Accounts & add a new administrative account called ‘Automated’ or similar. Set a password for that account, and make it a strong one.
Step 6: Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Scheduled Tasks
Step 7: Add a New Task with the following settings:

Under the Task Tab:
1. Run: “touch D:\TouchMe.txt” (or whatever you called your text file earlier).
2. Run As: “COMPUTERNAMEHERE\Automated”
3. Click ‘Set Password…’ and type in the password for the user you created in Step 5.

Under the Schedule Tab
1. Run When Idle
2. Every 3 minutes from 00:01 to 23:59 every day.
3. Schedule Task When Idle when the computer has been idle for 2 minutes.
4. Save the task. Job done.

Wow.. that SO should not be necessary WD. (If you’re wondering why I got you to create a new administrative user to do that, it’s so that you don’t get a DOS window pop up every time the touch command runs! If you run the task as another user, it runs in the background and doesn’t interrupt you).

Closing Thoughts

I would highly recommend this to anyone who wants a good mix of performance and data security. The MyBook is next to silent in operation even when extremely busy. It gets warm during heavy prolonged use, but nothing I’d be concerned about. I have at the time of writing 393GB of data stored on it, and 538GB free. My entire Picasa photo library, DVD collection, iTunes music library and network backups are stored on the drive and it capably performs whilst using all of them with no noticable latency at all.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 8:57 pm and is filed under Geek, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.