WESTERN DIGITAL MY BOOK MIRROR EDITION

Double Protection

External drive backups are all about securing the data on your PC. Nothing exemplifies this more than the Western Digital My Book. The Mirror Edition links two identical 3.5-inch 1-terabyte hard drives together to give you 1TB of RAID 1 (mirrored) storage (good for over 200 DVD movies or roughly two hundred thousand digital photos), which will be protected from the failure of a single hard drive.

The My Book Mirror Edition is a squat 6.75-by-4-by-6-inch (HWD) black box with ventilation holes punched into three of its sides. On the back you'll find the power button, a jack for the power adapter, and a mini USB port. In front is a vertical line of blue LEDs forming the activity/capacity indicator. The system is marketed as a 2TB drive because there are physically two drives, each 1TB, but you get that total capacity only if you go into the included WD RAID Manager and reset the drives to RAID 0.
The drive is a decent performer, especially considering that it copies everything twice. The My Book took 57 seconds to copy our standard 1.2GB test folder via Windows drag-and-drop and a pokey 3 hours 10 minutes via WD's Anywhere Backup utility. But that was just for the first backup; subsequent backups were almost instantaneous. Anywhere Backup isn't suited to full disaster-recovery backups. but the software will back up your data and media files.



The drive comes with WD Drive Manager, WD RAID Manager, and trial subscriptions to MioNet for online remote access and Memeo AutoSync for syncing folders between muItiple PCs. And with Gree n-Power drives, this unit is quiet and energy efficient. Any digital media enthusiast or business owner definitely needs one of these.—Joel Santo Domingo

PC Magazine January 2009