SubscribeWestern Digital My Book review
For Christmas my parents were kind enough to get me
the 1TB Western Digital My Book that I had on my
list. I made sure that they would get me the
Essential Edition because, at the time, it sported
Firewire 400 (which was a must for me because it
really is faster, overall, than USB 2.0, and uses
less system resources) as well as USB 2.0 and eSATA.
Setup was simple enough. I just plugged it in and it was ready to go. It came formatted as either NTFS or FAT32 (I wish I could remember, but I can’t). Because I was going to use it solely as a backup drive, being a Mac user, I chose to reformat it to use HFS+ with Journaling enabled. This was simple enough in Disk Utility, but at first the format kept failing. It failed about 5 times before I checked the settings under the Advanced... button. I changed it to use the GUID partition table, instead of a Master Boot Record, and it formatted to HFS+ just fine.
Software was a completely different story. The description of what the software does, just by the names, was quite odd. Here is a picture to illustrate what I’m getting at:
The disk image was called “WD Drive Manager” yet the name of the installer was “WD RAID Manager.” This had me quite confused and, because of that, I began scouring the internet to find the software that would let my drive use its capacity gauge. After about half an hour of that business, I finally (albeit, partially) discovered that the so-called “RAID Manager” was actually what I needed to install to gain the functionality of the capacity gauge (and it had nothing to do with RAID). So, I installed that, and low and behold! A lovely blue WD logo appeared in my menubar whenever I had my drive plugged in. That quickly warranted an uninstall, so I never really got a chance to see the capacity gauge in action. (But its not like I would see it much anyway because I put a pice of Gaffer Tape over the status light so it wouldn’t drive me insane as I slept).
Western Digital’s backup software isn’t any better either. After I had installed the software, it wanted me to immediately set up a backup schedule, which I didn’t want to do at the moment. Now you would think there would be an option to quit the app and set it up later but there wasn’t. The only way I could find to quit it was to force quit it. (Very elegant Western Digital, very elegant indeed). Once again, that functionality (or rather, lack of it) warranted another uninstall, but that process wasn’t so simple. The installer had set up launch daemons that needed to be forced quit through the Activity Monitor before I could delete it.
Personally I prefer to back up with SuperDuper! from Shirt Pocket Software. It makes a nice bootable clone of my MacBook’s hard drive so if it ever fails I can boot up from the clone and copy it back to a new hard drive with little downtime. Along with SuperDuper! I am using Time Machine. Dave Nanian of Shirt Pocket Software has done a great job of making sure SuperDuper! can back up to the same volume (yes, you don’t even have to partition your hard drive) without having to worry about it interfering with your Time Machine backups. SuperDuper! along with Time Machine are invaluable tools, both for their own reasons. SuperDuper! for its bootable clones and Time Machine for its ability to go back to a date and pick out a file that was accidentally deleted.
The Western Digital My Book is one of the most esthetically pleasing external hard drives that I have come across. It complements my MacBook very well and looks great amongst the mess that I call my desk. The only complaint that I have about its design is the lack of rubber feet on one of the sides so it can be placed horizontally.
For more pictures, check out the image gallery.
Setup was simple enough. I just plugged it in and it was ready to go. It came formatted as either NTFS or FAT32 (I wish I could remember, but I can’t). Because I was going to use it solely as a backup drive, being a Mac user, I chose to reformat it to use HFS+ with Journaling enabled. This was simple enough in Disk Utility, but at first the format kept failing. It failed about 5 times before I checked the settings under the Advanced... button. I changed it to use the GUID partition table, instead of a Master Boot Record, and it formatted to HFS+ just fine.
Software was a completely different story. The description of what the software does, just by the names, was quite odd. Here is a picture to illustrate what I’m getting at:
The disk image was called “WD Drive Manager” yet the name of the installer was “WD RAID Manager.” This had me quite confused and, because of that, I began scouring the internet to find the software that would let my drive use its capacity gauge. After about half an hour of that business, I finally (albeit, partially) discovered that the so-called “RAID Manager” was actually what I needed to install to gain the functionality of the capacity gauge (and it had nothing to do with RAID). So, I installed that, and low and behold! A lovely blue WD logo appeared in my menubar whenever I had my drive plugged in. That quickly warranted an uninstall, so I never really got a chance to see the capacity gauge in action. (But its not like I would see it much anyway because I put a pice of Gaffer Tape over the status light so it wouldn’t drive me insane as I slept).
Western Digital’s backup software isn’t any better either. After I had installed the software, it wanted me to immediately set up a backup schedule, which I didn’t want to do at the moment. Now you would think there would be an option to quit the app and set it up later but there wasn’t. The only way I could find to quit it was to force quit it. (Very elegant Western Digital, very elegant indeed). Once again, that functionality (or rather, lack of it) warranted another uninstall, but that process wasn’t so simple. The installer had set up launch daemons that needed to be forced quit through the Activity Monitor before I could delete it.
Personally I prefer to back up with SuperDuper! from Shirt Pocket Software. It makes a nice bootable clone of my MacBook’s hard drive so if it ever fails I can boot up from the clone and copy it back to a new hard drive with little downtime. Along with SuperDuper! I am using Time Machine. Dave Nanian of Shirt Pocket Software has done a great job of making sure SuperDuper! can back up to the same volume (yes, you don’t even have to partition your hard drive) without having to worry about it interfering with your Time Machine backups. SuperDuper! along with Time Machine are invaluable tools, both for their own reasons. SuperDuper! for its bootable clones and Time Machine for its ability to go back to a date and pick out a file that was accidentally deleted.
The Western Digital My Book is one of the most esthetically pleasing external hard drives that I have come across. It complements my MacBook very well and looks great amongst the mess that I call my desk. The only complaint that I have about its design is the lack of rubber feet on one of the sides so it can be placed horizontally.
For more pictures, check out the image gallery.