Western Digital WDH2Q20000N 2TB My Book Studio Edition II Hard Drive with Quad Interface (FW400/FW800, USB 2.0 & eSATA)

List Price: $499.99 Discount Price: $468.00

Features:

• Box Contents - Dual-drive storage system, FireWire 800 cable, FireWire 800 to 400 cable, USB cable, AC adapter, Software CD, Quick Install Guide, 5-Year Limited
• Lightning-fast FireWire 800 combined with RAID 0 (Striped) yields the speed you need for smooth video editing, rendering complex 3D objects or special effects and saving huge blocks of data in record time
• Designed to use only WD's GreenPower drives, this system uses about 30% less energy than standard systems and runs quietly because it doesn't need a fan
• 2TB = 2000GB Hard Drive Capacity
• Pre-configured to RAID 0 (Striped)

Customer Reviews:

Fantastic external drive [Posted on 2008-05-13]
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!

Excellent drive for use with time machine on apple OSX [Posted on 2008-06-19]
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.

high performance, 5 year warranty, self-rebuilding raid mirror [Posted on 2008-06-23]
If you want the best performance, you would want to use it as eSATA. This would mean a cardbus or expresscard eSATA adaptor on a laptop, for example. But here is the one star that I have taken off: at this price, it still does not come with an eSATA cable! It has cables for USB and the 1394, but no eSATA. I have not had the chance to test it in eSATA because of the cable. The USB2 speed is good enough for my archival application. I've also read around and eSATA is not faster than USB2 by much in real life (maybe 25MB/s vs 30MB/s).

The 5 year warranty is industry standard and is reassuring. And by the time it's up, you will want a larger storage anyway. :P But you must keep in mind that that if the controller in the enclosure dies, your whole array dies. Hopefully the controller didn't write bogus information into your harddrives and then hopefully WD will be able to ship you a new enclosure and you can recover that way. (This is the one weakness of having RAID 1 as the only copy. Be ware: a faulty controller can corrupt your data or even wipe your drives clean. Don't let that be your only copy.)

Cost-wise, each of its 1TB harddrives retails at about 180 as of this writing and you still need two enclosures to mount them externally. That means you are paying 470 - 2*180 = 110 for WD's own enclosure. It may still sound like a lot for an enclosure but the pros of this one outweight the cost and cons:

- The enclosure does RAID 1 (mirroring) in its hardware, no real cons here as long as 1TB+1TB mirroring is good enough for your application.

- Fanless: Less noise and it's really silent, but it also runs rather warm even with air conditioning. I do note that there is a temperature sensor that will stop the drives when overheated. So there is technically no worry, unless the temperature sensor itself dies... And being fanless is what makes the 5yr warranty even better. I've replaced one too many fans in my enclosures. (Many fans die within 3 years...)

- Self-rebuilds: After replacing a drive, it will rebuild in several hours. Good: completely automatic. Bad: it does this offline so the data is not accessible while rebuilding.

- Green assembly: I should note that you can only use WD's own "harddrive assembly" in this enclosure. You cannot (at least within the warranty's limit) use your own harddrives, not even WD Green Series retail ones since they do not come with the assembly hardware. See the manual if in doubt.

In all, highly recommended if the capacity suits your need.

double 1gb hard drive with RAID controller [Posted on 2008-07-25]
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.

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