Last Updated February 6, 2009   Product Rating   Large 2TB of storage "Green" drives use less electricity User replaceable hard drives   eSATA cable is not included Front LED capacity indicator requires installation of a utility

The MyBook Studio Edition II from Western Digital is their brand new 2 terabyte portable hard drive that can be used to transport files, backup files, and share files among various computers, both PC and Mac. This device is specifically geared toward creative type of people, such as video editors or professional Photoshop users, but it can also be used for any other purpose as well. The Western Digital MyBook Studio Edition II has been designed for high-capacity and speed as well as providing a lot of connectivity options.

The exterior of the MyBook Studio Edition II is all silver-painted and looks a lot like brushed aluminum. The corners of the device are sleek-looking due to the rounded edges and along the backside, it is cut out in various Morse code-looking dots and dashes, which actually does spell various words according to the Western Digital marketing team. Otherwise, it looks pretty neat and there is also a USB 2.0 port, a mini USB port, Firewire 800, and eSATA. This makes the Studio Edition II one of most connectable devices on the market today, which is a huge plus over other external hard drives.

Inside the WD MyBook Studio Edition II are two pairs of WD Green Power 1TB hard drives, which are Western Digital's new eco-friendly high-capacity hard drives. Both drives are configured as RAID 0 enabled, which puts speed and capacity over data protection. It comes formatted for HFS+, which is the default Mac hard drive format. If you're mainly a PC user, you can reformat the drives to either FAT32 or NTFS file formats using the included WD Drive Manager utility. From the software utility, you can also change the RAID configuration from 0 to 1. RAID 0 is the default and it uses both drives equally without data protection allowing for 2TB of storage. RAID 1 mirrors the data across both drives to protect the data from disk failure, but it will only give you half the total storage space (1TB). If one of the drives do fail, they are user replaceable.

For the best performance and fastest transfer possible, it would be advantageous to use the eSATA connector to connect your computers to the Studio Edition II. If your computer doesn't have an eSATA port on your desktop, you can install a PCI eSATA card on your motherboard. If you want to connect a laptop, you can purchase a PCMCIA eSATA card and an eSATA connector. If you don't want to go that route, the next fastest connection would be the Firewire 800 interface.

If you're a Mac user, the WD MyBook Studio Edition II can be used with OS 10.5's Time Machine backup system. You can also use the software that comes with the device, including WD Anywhere Backup and trial versions of Memeo AutoSync and MioNet. There is a drive capacity indicator LED on the front of the device, but it will only work if you install the WD RAID manager on your computer.

The MyBook Studio Edition II is marketed by Western Digital as being a "green" device due to the user of their new WD green hard drives. The drives are both RoHS compliant, which means they are designed to work with Energy Star-rated computers. If you're looking for a large amount of storage, connectivity, and to cut-down on your impact on the environment, the Studio Edition II from Western Digital is what you are looking for.

Overall, the Western Digital MyBook Studio Edition II is mainly marketed for Mac users, but it will work just fine on PCs after you reformat the drives using the included utility as we mentioned earlier. The speed of eSATA or Firewire 800 makes it transfer files extremely fast, especially when using large video or picture files. If you are a hobbyist or professional digital media user, the Studio Edition II is exactly what you want to have.