Western Digital 2TB My Book Mirror edition

Western Digital introduces the big brother of the older My Book and this time it's a gigantic block of an external hard drive. Western Digital has a reputation for high reliability and the Mirror edition of the My Book, which sports two hard drives of 1 terabyte each that can be configured in RAID 1, seems tailor-made to further that legacy.


Specifications


Design and features

Despite its immense block-like looks it's actually rather light at a mere 2.3 kg. The drive feels a bit rickety and not nearly as solid as its smaller sibling. This one also claims that it can be serviced by the user himself. However, the enclosure can only have WD GreenPower drives inserted into it. It follows the My Book tradition of having a blue Cyclops-like led display on the front.

This serves as a capacity indicator, if you're running on RAID 1, then it starts off as half full. There are slits for ventilation along the top, back and bottom, which is good considering it has no fan.

These allow glimpses of its two hard drives, each with a terabyte of capacity. A unique feature of this drive is that the top can pop open and hard drives can be removed and replaced without any tools.

There's a plate to secure the drives in place, it has a screw but with a mechanism to let users unscrew it with their hands. The drives are meant to be pulled up by the hard plastic loops attached to the back.


However, the drives require a lot of force to be pulled out.

Software

It manages this seamlessly and can easily be converted to RAID 1 or back to full capacity. It supports data striping so that the two drives appear and can be used as one when in RAID 0.

Another of the trialware programs that you get with this drive is the Memeo AutoSync program that lets you keep two folders synchronized completely and automatically. The sync is bidirectional meaning that changes made to either directory will be reflected in the other. This is fine but there are Open Source alternatives like SumSync.


The Anywhere Backup program makes it easy to choose a destination to save your data, choose exactly what gets backed up and whether it should be encrypted. It also allows you to choose the number of versions of each file to keep in case they are altered. You can choose to have the program carried on the backup destination as well to restore your data onto any computer.

This is also a trailware application and its 'powered by Memeo' logo ensures that it is merely a skin for the previous application. Again, you might be better off with alternative backup programs.
Performance

HD tach shows a good performance of 32.6MBps read and a slightly below expected 29.6MBps write speed.

HD tune reinforces Tach and shows an average read speed of 32.5MBps.

Physical tests


It looks like it's taken quite a beating during the physical tests,
scoring lower than you might expect from a drive so large. The sequential read speeds are good and the write speeds lag slightly behind with 30.12. However, it's not a bad speed. The multiple write speed is 26.94MBps, which is quite average and 28.25MBps for the multiple read is acceptable.

Conclusion

The software that you get with the drive is nearly all trialware and
freeware, the only exception being the RAID manager, which is also probably the most usable software that is provided. The RAID mirroring and data striping works well, one surprising thing was that despite having no fans, the drive barely heats up. The open nature of the drive and plentiful ventilation slits do a remarkable job of keeping it cool.

Not having a fan also results in very silent operation. The system they have set up for manually replacing the drives is impractical at best. The transfer speeds were slightly disappointing, despite the speed itself being average to good, the amount of data that will be transferred with this drive is anything but average.

At a cost of Rs. 28,500 with a 5-year warranty this is obviously not for the home user. The proper place for this is in an office environment where data integrity is the priority. With this is mind, it seems slightly below average. Sure it will secure your data once it's on the drive but it might take forever to get there thanks to the limitations of a USB only interface. Its silent operation will suit an office environment well and as long as you value data security over speed of transfers this may be the storage solution you need.