[Macworld]

Post your comments for Western Digital My Book Studio Edition (1TB) here

[cmleys]

I have this drive, and it works great with TM, but you should know that the capacity guage does not work with Leopard, even when connected via FW.
WDC needs to update their button manager software to be compatible with Leopard. Hopefully soon.

[Walt_Basil]

I am very happy with mine. Plays well with time machine. You forget it's even there.

[adamyonk]

Is it possible to use FW to daisy-chain this drive with other external drives?

[mretondo]

Lets say I have the drive connected to my Mac via Firewire 800. I then daisy chain a Firewire 400 drive to the My Book. Will this have an effect on the My Book i.e. slow it down to Firewire 400 speed?

[sigma8]

I have the 500 gigabyte version, which I'm positioning to use as my main drive. It's pretty much the same thing (just half the space and nearly half the price), and it works really nicely. I wasn't even aware that it was supposed to show a capacity meter. It does make pretty lightshows with that Knight Rider-ish light on the front, though.
I am saving up for a 1 TB drive that will be my Time Machine drive. I wanted to make sure the TM drive would be bigger than my main data drive. Thinking about the time capsule, but that is a bit pricey in comparison...plus it doesn't offer the ports or future utility...
But it would work with both my desktop AND my laptop..

[mrbach]

The button manager software does indeed conflict with Leopard, particularly with the iMac and FW 800 bus. The sleep function of the drives seems to be embedded in firmware and cannot be over-ridden. My 500 G FW800 MyBook seems reliable, but you are on your own with support. Western Digital does not reply to support requests and does not update their software. For this reason, I would not buy another Western Digital product.

[viyer]

I find it interesting that the eSATA benchmarks are slower than the FireWire 800 benchmarks in both the duplicate and low memory tests, and is only one second faster on the copy test. Is it really worth purchasing another card?

[dougoftheabaci]

Just a note: I have a WD MyBook Premium II 1TB, and if this thing uses the same fan system it'll be very noisy. I recommend looking at the LaCie models instead. They're also more reliable in my experience.

[pln]

Has anyone opened one of these up to see the internal HDD? I had a WD MyBook 500GB bought a couple of years ago. It worked great, but the drive failed recently.
I opened it up to replace the HDD, but although it was SATA, the enclosure's power connector wasn't the standard SATA connector and needed a legacy power connector on the drive.
I now use a MiniStack v3.
I wouldn't buy one of these unless I knew it took a standard SATA drive I could get off the shelf.

[Tom Snyder]

I purchased one of these drives for a G5 Quad as a backup for my boot drive.
I created a backup using Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper and the drive will not boot my G5 and All I get is a Question mark.
I did the same operation with another external FW drive and I worked fine.
A G5 won't boot from a USB port and I don't have an eSATA card
to see if it would boot from those ports.
I contacted Western Digital and they offer no support for this problem.

[anothersite]

What OS are you using? What partition format (Master Boot Record (MBR) for FAT seems unlikely, since the drive ships Mac formatted, but I do not have this version of the drive so I do not know for sure): GUID Partition Table (Leopard boot compatible) or Apple Partition Map (Tiger and earlier boot compatible)?

I would suggest that you start your troubleshooting by making sure that the partition formatting is correct for booting your PPC machine and OS.

[Tom Snyder]

I am using Leopard and I reformatted the drive in Leopard before I tried backing up to it.

[Michael_S]

I'm curious and skeptical about Western Digital's spindown (sleep) feature. It cannot be controlled by software and has led to problems with one of my drives, a previous model "MyBook Pro" (250 GB):
The file transfer speed after wake from sleep is reproducibly only about 1/4 of what it is immediately after plug-in. Has the Macworld lab test noticed or tested for this effect?