WD My Book Mirror
Published on June 15th, 2009.
I present to you..... the My Book Mirror by Western Digital xP. Well, I acquired this external hard disk which is known specifically as the Western Digital My Book 2TB Mirror Edition.Went looking all around is Low Yat Plaza for this but out of all the shops that I went to, only one of them sold this. This is an external hard disk drive if you cannot guess from the picture ^^;
It comes in a green box denoting the environment friendly thing. There's a even a green leaf there on the picture lol. The box is neatly packed and is easily recognizable as an external hard disk with the picture in front.
The external hard drive comes included with the usual drivers, manual, etc. There are a few softwares which come included like the WD Anywhere Backup but all of them are trial versions of the software and you have to purchase them after the trial period expires. Did not bother installing them as it will just nag me to register it later on.
I found this charger to be rather cool and interesting. The design of it seems modular and you can change the type of sockets for the adapter so that it will fit into your power outlet depending on which country you are in. It comes with 2 other sockets. The one that I'm using is the 3-pin one.
The drive comes packed with a plastic wrapper to prevent scratches.
Here, we have the drive itself. It only comes in the colour black and it has a glossy finish. Looks really sleek and it fits well in most places but the glossy surface means that it will be a fingerprint magnet if you fiddle with it often. Well, that's not really an issue if you just leave it there to work.
As for the rear of the unit, it comes with a USB connection an input for power supply. There is a button at the back too to power up/power down or wake it up from "sleep" mode. Speaking of power, since WD emphasizes on energy savings and what not, the drives will enter a kind of "sleep" mode which consumes less power if you leave it idle (no transfers to or from the drive) after a couple of minutes.
Inside of this external hard disk is actually 2 x 1TB hard drives which are pre-configured to run in RAID 1 mode which is data mirroring which is what all this external drive is about as the name suggests. You can set it to RAID 0 if you do not want your data to be mirrored and want to make full use of the 2TB space for storage. But that kinda deafeats the purpose of getting an external hard disk which is meant to work with RAID 1.
The hard disk drives in the casing are meant to be user-serviceable, meaning that you can change it any time in case one of the drives fail.
The LED indicator here shows you the status of the drive, whether it is powered on, trasnfering data or is in sleep mode. When it is in sleep mode, the lights will blink on and of periodically. The indicator even does a nifty job of telling you how much free space is available left on the drive. The more filled up it is, the higher the blue bar gets lighted up ^^
The Mirror Edition only comes with a USB connection. If you are looking for Firewire and eSata, then you should consider getting the WD My Book Studio Edition II which also has 2TB variants and supports RAID 1. The Studio Edition II will also support Macs though its more expensive than the Mirror Edition.
Supposedly, some morese code runs along the top, back and bottom of the drive. Not sure what are the meanings though ^^;
Overall, the WD My Book Mirror is great if you plan on backing up your files onto a external hard disk. Having RAID 1 means having to worry less in the event that one of the drives will ever fail. Your files are still safe as they are copied to both of the drives as soon as you trasnfer them from your PC.
Decided to get this due to the growing amount of stuff on my desktop computer not to mention the need to backup data. I have given up on backing up data onto DVDs as its really time consuming and it will be messy to burn all the DVDs and having to store them which will take up a lot of physical space. Not to mention DVDs are write once only unless you are willing to fork out extra $$ for rewriteables or DVD-RAMs.
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