Innovative E-Label Display Provides a Better Way to Tell Drives Apart
WD today introduced its new high-performance My Book Studio desktop external drives with a customizable e-label that is always visible, even when unplugged, so it’s easy to know the contents of the drive. Designed for Mac users and creative professionals, the new My Book Studio drives are equipped with a FireWire 800 interface to give users the speed they need for demanding tasks like photo and video editing and graphic design.
- Western Digital My Book Studio 2TB Compact and light enough to easily fit in a backpack or briefcase, Western Digital’s My Book Studio external hard drive is a cute little bugger.
- Getting Started with a My Book Studio How to format a WD hard drive to exFAT or FAT32 file system Answer ID 291| This answer explains how to format a drive in the exFAT or FAT32 file system.
- Getting Started with a My Book for Mac How to format a WD hard drive to exFAT or FAT32 file system. This answer explains how to setup and use WD Security and WD Drive Utilities on a Windows or Mac computer. How to install WD Security & WD Drive Utilities. 2 TB: Mac®/Windows®.
My Book Studio desktop hard drive features blazing-fast SuperSpeed USB 3.0 connectivity and a cool to the touch aluminum enclosure that looks great on your Mac desktop. It's formatted for Mac and compatible with Apple Time Machine making backups quick and easy.
The new My Book Studio drives are TimeMachine compatible, offer automatic, continuous backup with WD SmartWare™ software, and include 256-bit hardware-based encryption to provide a high level of security. Available now at select retailers and the WD online store (shopwd.com), the new My Book Studio drives are formatted for Mac and offered in capacities of 500 GB, 1 TB, 1.5 TB and 2 TB.
Creative professionals generate, store and back up massive amounts of digital content. During in-home and in-studio interviews with consumers, WD team members observed that many were taping notes or other hand-made labels on their many drives, to tell them apart. For these customers, WD developed the e-label high-contrast smart display which reads like ink on paper, and lets the user create a customized label to describe the drive’s contents.
Utilizing e-paper technology similar to that found on the Amazon Kindle, the information on the display remains clearly visible even when the drive is unplugged, and can be changed easily and as often as desired. The e-label also shows available storage capacity and drive security status.
“Storing and backing up is a huge part of my workflow as a professional photographer,” said Bruce Dorn. “I have been using WD hard drives for quite a while now and my experience has been exceptional with reliability and ease-of-use, and I love the design. The new e-label smart display will help me organize my projects while password protection and encryption will keep it more secure. The new drives deliver backup not only for professionals, but for anyone who is taking pictures, collecting music or who needs to back up their digital life.”
My Book Studio drives also feature user-selected password protection combined with 256-bit hardware-based encryption, which scrambles files before they are stored. Typically found only on much more expensive drive systems, the encryption acts as a virtual padlock to keep users’ data safe.
The new My Book Studio drives come equipped with WD SmartWare software, an integrated application which provides automatic and continuous backup, as well as control of the e-label display, password and other settings. When the My Book Studio drive is plugged in for the first time, the simple and intuitive first backup process launches automatically. The real-time visual interface of WD SmartWare software gives users a reassuring view of their backup as it happens. After the first backup, users’ files are backed up automatically every time they change or add a file.
WD SmartWare software is compatible with the Apple TimeMachine. Users with older versions of Mac OS (not equipped with TimeMachine) or those who wish to use the drive for both backup and extra storage have the option to use WD SmartWare software backup capability.
“Photographers, videographers and other Mac computer enthusiasts require fast performance for their complex projects,” said Dale Pistilli, vice president of marketing for WD’s branded products group. “They also have a very large number of projects and files which they need to keep organized across multiple hard drives. With a FireWire 800 interface and customizable e-label, the new My Book Studio drives offer an elegant, high-speed solution for these creative professionals to interact with, organize and securely archive their media.”
Price and Availability
The new My Book Studio drives are offered in capacities of 500 GB, 1 TB, 1.5 TB and 2 TB and have a 3-year limited warranty. My Book Studio drives are available now at select retailers and online at shopwd.com. MSRP ranges from $149.99 to $299.99 USD depending on model.
The new My Book Studio drives are offered in capacities of 500 GB, 1 TB, 1.5 TB and 2 TB and have a 3-year limited warranty. My Book Studio drives are available now at select retailers and online at shopwd.com. MSRP ranges from $149.99 to $299.99 USD depending on model.
My Book Studio
The new WD My Book Studio drives feature:
The new WD My Book Studio drives feature:
- Smart display with a customizable e-label that reminds users of what is stored on the drive, available capacity and security status at-a-glance, even when the drive is unplugged;
- High-performance FireWire 800 interface to access data at top speeds and USB 2.0 interface;
- Plug-and-play ready for Mac users and compatible with Apple TimeMachine;
- WD SmartWare software that visually presents consumers’ data in a software control center, providing them peace of mind that their precious photos, videos and files are securely protected;
- 256-bit hardware-based encryption and password protection for peace of mind knowing that data is protected from unauthorized access;
- Smaller, sleeker, more streamlined design and elegant book-like shape that takes up minimal space and allows two or more My Book drives to nestle together neatly like volumes on a shelf;
- WD GreenPower Technology™ lowers internal drive power consumption by up to 30 percent, a sleep mode reduces power during idle times, and a power-saving feature turns the drive on and off with your computer;
- Planet-friendly packaging derived from recycled materials to minimize waste;
- HFS + Journaled1 formatting and are compatible with Mac OS X Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard™;
- 3-year limited warranty.
WD SmartWare Software
WD SmartWare software features:
WD SmartWare software features:
- Visual backup displays that show content in categories and shows the progress of backup;
- Automatic, continuous data backup will instantly make a second copy whenever you add or change a file;
- Retrieve valuable data to its original location whether it’s lost data or the file has been overwritten; and,
- Customizable data backup that allows user to set drive security, run diagnostics, manage the power settings, and more from the WD SmartWare control center.
1 My Book Studio drives can be reformatted NTFS to work with Windows Vista and Windows 7.
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Western Digital My Book Studio 2TB
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Compact and light enough to easily fit in a backpack or briefcase, Western Digital’s My Book Studio external hard drive is a cute little bugger. Designed to resemble a book, the 6.5-inch tall drive stands upright, and you have the option of digitally labeling your drive (with 12 characters or less) so it’ll read like a title on the binding a book.
Designed specifically for a Mac, this plug-in-and-go drive is compatible with Apple’s TimeMachine software and has two FireWire 800 ports and one USB 2.0 port, with cables for both included. The drive is relatively quiet, with its ventilation system sitting up top, and its plastic build keeps the unit lightweight at 2.6 pounds. Unfortunately, its plastic casing also makes the unit a little less durable than aluminum drives, and when we received our My Book Studio, it came with a little bulge in the backside that we had to physically snap back into place.
One of the biggest complaints I had about the My Book Studio was its fickle power button, which made it very unclear whether I should either press and release the power button quickly, or hold for a few second and wait, in order to turn the drive on and off. Either way seemed to work (or not work, rather) and because its tiny LED light had a few seconds lag time to indicate when the unit was turned on, I resorted to becoming the hard drive whisperer: experimenting with button pushing wait times as I nestled my ear against the My Book Studio to hear the drive spinning for startup.
When I did manage to power on the My Book Studio, it performed well in our hard drive tests. Transferring a 1GB file took 42 and 34 seconds through a USB and FireWire 400 (using a FireWire 800 to FireWire 400 cable), respectively. Duplicating the same file took an average of 1 minute, 10 seconds using USB, and 55 seconds using FireWire 400. In our low-memory Photoshop tests, the drive timed in at 1 minute, 24 seconds for USB, and 1 minutes, 3 seconds for FireWire 400. When we tested the My Book Studio using FireWire 800, all three tests clocked in less than 45 seconds: transferring our 1GB file took 22 seconds, copying the file averaged about 32 seconds, and our Photoshop test was completed in 43 seconds.
Our AJA system tests, which mimics writing a full scale, high quality, 2GB HD video file that is 2GB with a video frame size of 1920-by-1080 and 10-bit RGB, yielded 28.1MBps for writes and 37.1MBps for reads through USB. With FireWire 400, the write and read speeds were 27.6MBps and 33.7MBps, respectively. With FireWire 800, the write speed was 60.1MBps, while the read speed was 54.6MB/ps.
Timed trials
Copy 1GB file to USB 2.0 | 0:42 |
---|---|
Copy 1GB file to FireWire 400 | 0:34 |
Copy 1GB file to FireWire 800 | 0:22 |
Duplicate 1GB file via USB 2.0 | 1:10 |
Duplicate 1GB file via FireWire 400 | 0:55 |
Duplicate 1GB file via FireWire 800 | 0:32 |
Low-memory Photoshop: USB 2.0 | 1:24 |
Low-memory Photoshop: FireWire 400 | 1:03 |
Low-memory Photoshop: FireWire 800 | 0:43 |
Scale = Minutes: Seconds
AJA tests
My Passport For Mac 2tb
Write | Read | |
---|---|---|
USB | 28.1MBps | 37.1MBps |
FireWire 400 | 27.6MBps | 33.7MBps |
FireWire 800 | 60.1MBps | 54.6MBps |
How we tested. We ran all tests with the drive connected to a Mac Pro Quad 2.66GHz Xeon with Mac OS X 10.5 installed and 1GB of RAM. We tested the drive with each available port. We copied a folder containing 1GB of data from our Mac's hard drive to the external hard drive to test the drive's write speed. We then duplicated that file on the external drive to test both read and write speeds. We also used the drive as a scratch disk when running our low-memory Adobe Photoshop CS3 Suite test. This test is a set of four tasks performed on a 150MB file, with Photoshop's memory set to 25 percent.—Macworld Lab testing by Lynn La
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The drive also comes with its own software, called WD SmartWare, which mounts on your desktop when the drive is plugged into your Mac. Sometimes however, our Mac did not register SmartWare when our My Book was connected, though a few restarts of our computer were able to remedy this situation.
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The SmartWare software has its benefits because it is a one-stop shop, a control center to customize all your My Book Studio’s capacity and security settings. You can choose your password and with its 256-bit hardware-based encryption, the drive will have an extra layer of protection from unwanted access. It is also a place where you can see the progress of your backup and the different categories of your drive’s content like music, photos, and movies, along with how much memory they are each respectively using.
SmartWare also allows you to customize your My Book Studio’s label, so you can name your drive something along the lines of “VIDEOS 09” or “HOME PICTURES” to remind you of what’s inside. The label itself uses e-paper technology, which does not require a backlight to illuminate pixels like most flat panel displays. Instead, it reflects light like paper, and because it uses no electricity to display its text, the label will remain displayed, regardless of whether your My Book Studio is plugged in. The label also shows the available storage capacity left on your drive and a padlock icon lets you know if it is secured.
Macworld buying advice
At $250 for the 2TB model, Western Digital’s My Book Studio is a decent hard drive for all your casual storing needs. Although the confusing power button is something I find worth griping about, its nifty labeling feature and easy to navigate SmartWare software make up for it. Also, its decent results times and environmentally conscious elements definitely make the My Book worth putting on your shelf.
Mac Wd
[Lynn La is a Macworld staff editor.]
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Wd My Book Studio 2tb For Mac
Western Digital My Book Studio 2TB
Cons
- Fickle power button