Western Digital My Book Studio Edition 1TB, 750GB, 640GB, 500GB, 320GB External HDD Review

Western Digital’s (WD) My Book Studio is a well featured model in WD’s desktop external hard disk drive (HDD) series. It’s important to note upfront that this external HDD is preformatted and loaded with backup and management software suitable for a Macintosh operating system (Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later). A driver and utilities for Windows users is available for download.

Western Digital My Book Studio Edition

It is the high speed eSATA (3 Gb/s), which approaches the transfer speed of an internal HDD, and FireWire 800 (98Mb/s) interfaces which should attract those who deal with lots of large image and video files and want a quick response time from their external storage. The wide range of available storage capacities (320GB to 1 TB) should suit a wide spectrum of users.

Setup for the WD My Book Studio Edition is dead simple being Plug-n-Play with the preloaded software loading the first time the unit is plugged in. If you forget to turn it off at any time it will automatically shift to a standby mode after 10 minutes until it is automatically woken by activity.

There is no need to manually backup as the preloaded software will handle automatic backups. Keeping track of the available storage capacity is simple using with the provided capacity gauge.

One feature not available with the WD Studio Edition is RAID capability. The Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II is RAID enabled.

HDD Backup Software

WD Anywhere Backup includes multiple destination backup and simple, intuitive file recovery.

WD Drive Manager is a custom Western Digital utility for My Book which includes drivers for the capacity gauge and SmartPower. SmartPower automatically powers off and on with the computer however, it is not available in eSATA mode.