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WD My Book Home vs WD My Book Studio

W

WCunha

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 15, 2007
75
0
I am going to upgrade my MBP to Leopard and I have not backed up my computer ever!

I am looking at getting an external hard drive and so far I think I have narrowed it down to two. I found a WD 750gb My Book Home Edition at Circuit City for $118 and a WD 500gb My Book Studio Edition at Amazon for $112.

My question is are there any other differences between the two besides the FireWire 800 port? If they are pretty much the same I was thinking of the Home Edition since I will only be using it for weekly back ups.

I would just like to get some other opinions.

Thanks, Wade
 
If you are planning to make large file transfers you should consider buying the one with FireWire 800. It makes a substantial difference speed-wise.
 
I have the studio version. It also comes pre/formatted HFS+. The extra connectors are useful for future connectivity too (FW 800 and eSATA).

It's a really solid drive.
 
If your computer has FW800, then there's no question, really. Studio Edition all the way. It is so much faster than FW400 (let alone USB2), it's not even funny.
 
I will never go near Western Digital's products again. So many of their drives have failed on me, taking my precious data with them.

Beware!
 
neiltc13 said:
I will never go near Western Digital's products again. So many of their drives have failed on me, taking my precious data with them.

Beware!
Click to expand...
Many people will say the same thing about any other brand. Fact is, WD is a quality hard drive manufacturer. Sure they sometimes make faulty drives, but so do Seagate, Hitachi and Samsung. Any drive of these brands will be fine. If you want a drive nobody has horror stories about, well... good luck finding one.
 
Thanks to everyone for your opinions.

I was thinking of partioning the drive in half and using one side for time machine back ups and the other half as a bootable drive using carbon copy cloner. Does this make sense?

The home edition does have firewire 400 if that makes any difference and my MBP does firewire 800.

Wade
 
WCunha said:
Thanks to everyone for your opinions.

I was thinking of partioning the drive in half and using one side for time machine back ups and the other half as a bootable drive using carbon copy cloner. Does this make sense?

The home edition does have firewire 400 if that makes any difference and my MBP does firewire 800.

Wade
Click to expand...

Makes perfect sense as it is exactly what I do. :D
 
Bengt77 said:
Many people will say the same thing about any other brand. Fact is, WD is a quality hard drive manufacturer. Sure they sometimes make faulty drives, but so do Seagate, Hitachi and Samsung. Any drive of these brands will be fine. If you want a drive nobody has horror stories about, well... good luck finding one.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but I've heard a lot more problems about Western Digital than I have with other brands. Seagate had problems with one particular harddrive model a little while ago, but I'd trust their harddisks over everyone elses. Don't know why.

Saying that, I hear WD's laptop harddisks are entirely different from their desktop-sized harddisks, so WD's reputation doesn't extend into laptop drives. I own a WD 250 GB Passport harddisk that powers through USB. No problems at all thus far. I'm planning to get a Seagate 320 GB 7200 RPM internal laptop drive to replace the Seagate 120 GB that came with my MacBook.
 
Can anyone specifically recommend a certain hard drive in that price range. I have read some pretty bad reviews of the WD My Book and I really have no experience with external hard drives except for what I have read.

Thanks again, Wade
 
Look at the Seagate Freeagent Go for Mac drives - they have FireWire 800 for great transfer speeds.
 
WCunha said:
Can anyone specifically recommend a certain hard drive in that price range. I have read some pretty bad reviews of the WD My Book and I really have no experience with external hard drives except for what I have read.

Thanks again, Wade
Click to expand...


do you have the URLs for these bad reviews??
 
Abstract said:
Yeah, but I've heard a lot more problems about Western Digital than I have with other brands. Seagate had problems with one particular harddrive model a little while ago, but I'd trust their harddisks over everyone elses. Don't know why.

Saying that, I hear WD's laptop harddisks are entirely different from their desktop-sized harddisks, so WD's reputation doesn't extend into laptop drives. I own a WD 250 GB Passport harddisk that powers through USB. No problems at all thus far. I'm planning to get a Seagate 320 GB 7200 RPM internal laptop drive to replace the Seagate 120 GB that came with my MacBook.
Click to expand...

I've only had one external hard drive, a USB 2.0 250 GB WD My Book (older IDE version) and never had any problems with it, I've had it since...I believe 2004 or 2005. My iMac internal HDD recently died and I'm running it off my bootable back up on my external HDD, still no problems. I've got an internal 320GB WD HDD inside my MacBook and never had a problem with it (but to be fair I've only had that for a few months), so unless my iMac has an internal WD HDD I've never had any problems w/ WD HDDs. Though I realize my experience with HDDs is limited, as someone previously stated all HDD companies have there problems, and most/all of the popular ones also have it's followers who swear by them. For me it's WD, but I think it's all really luck of the draw. Some models have higher than average rates of failure, but even on the ones that have low average rates of failure it's still just an average - as I said luck of the draw.
 
Well i just bought a WD My Book 500gb Studio edition.

Do I have to partion the external hard drive to use Time Machine and have a bootable clone of my MBP hard drive or can use both without the partion?

Thanks, Wade
 
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