WD drops 4TB whopper

Like Burger King, Western Digital believes in whoppers; it’s just announced a 4TB capacity My Book external drive.

Inside this My Book Studio Edition II is a pair of 2TB SATA drives with four interfaces to a host PC: eSATA and FireWire 800 for maximum performance, with FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 for more pedestrian and wide-ranging connectivity. The drives use WD’s GreenPower technology to make them eco-friendly and are configured in a RAID 0 configuration, which stripes data across both drives.

The product uses a convection cooling design and has a power-saving mode. It’s designed to not need a fan, and to therefore run more quietly than other external drives, as well as draw less electricity.

The product is formatted for Mac computers and compatible with Apple’s Time Machine backup utility. With the RAID 0 feature, WD says the product is good and fast for creative professionals, workgroups, small offices and anyone else looking for fast data transfer. A WD spokesperson suggested photographers, graphic artists, videographers, and home video enthusiasts with video editing applications as likely customers.

I guess I should have known this was coming. I purchased 4 WD 1tb drives when they were around $119 apiece and 2 are full and the other 2 are backups. I also run 2 Lacie big disk (500 gb each) for my file transfers (read/write) but I use the wd simply for storage (wd were newer & this prevents wear and tear. I also have 4 drives (500 gb apiece) just sitting not in use because I upgraded to the WD a while back.

You could hook this baby up to a Windows box and make a container using software from www.truecrypt.org and have you a 4tb file box. This would of course be protected from prying eyes re-writing the installed software with a truecrypt from the mentioned site. The Lacies also looked promising. I only run Lacie drives and WD drives because of reliability. Haven’t found others to measure up.

Source