Western Digital My Book Studio Edition 500GB Firewire 400 / 800 & eSata External Hard Drive

From reading the comments posted here by other reviewers, I can only assume that WD have two versions of this drive. Most of the negative comments are about noise and unreliability (usually the people with a negative experience seem to have suffered from both).

Fortunately, I'm on the lucky side of the fence. As I am sat here in a silent room with the WD MyBook Studio placed on the desk in front of me, I can tell you that it is neigh on silent. Noise is a subjective thing but I a) hate loud noises and b) have superb hearing (measured that better than average last time it was checked).
In fact, my 24" iMac makes more noise and to be fair, the computer is almost silent - anyone who owns one will know just how quiet they are.

Now, that's when the drive is idle. OS X does a fair job of keeping external drives spun down when not being accessed, so anyone would expect it to be very quiet. A lack of internal fan ensures that the only audible noise comes from the WD Eco Drive which is designed to be quiet anyway.
When I do access data stored on the unit, there is a 2-3 second pause (assuming I've left it alone long enough to spin down in the first place) before the drive gracefully, and again quietly, spins up. At full tilt with 80Gb of data being copied to it via firewire, I can still say that the noise is by no means intrusive - perhaps a quiet whir of the platters and the low frequency thudding of the head moving when data is being written to the device.

Some of you may be thinking by now that I'm a silence freak. As it happens, I am, and proudly so. I have my computer and the drive in the same room as my high end home cinema equipment and would simply not tolerate background noise that might interfere with my listening experience.

With regards to reliability, yes, I've heard stories of these drives dying and can only say that I've been fortunate enough to avoid that isue. I think its a small number, percentage wise, of drives that fail, Western Digital have a long standing pedigree for making reliable hard discs. The issue certainly isn't from heat as I'd once suspected, covering the cooling vents on the top of the unit feels about as warm as putting your hand close to your leg but not quite touching it.

Summary:
Clearly my experience has been a good one, there is some warmth but this is far from the heat and noise given off by say, a Playstation 3. The drive i have is a welcome addition to my computer setup and I can only wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone looking for a Firewire 800 capable device of this capacity.

Good luck with whatever purchase you eventually make.

Well, frustratingly enough after under a year of use, mine has given up the ghost, I wish I had paid more attention to similar stories when I was making the purchasing decision, I just took the old, 'it won't happen to me', mentality, it didn't pay off.

We'll start with some positive points, yes, it is very attractive, the design is sleek, and it matches all the aluminium Mac products, (read: all but the white MacBook currently).

Also, it is very quiet, and the speed over FW800, (which I was using with a MacBook Pro), is bleedingly fast.

However, all this is good and well, but not when the product stops working. My problem is as follows, I noticed one night that it was starting up repeatedly, on it's own, attached to the MBP, but that was 'sleeping'.

I thought this was strange so held down the power button to force it off. Then, ~5mins later, I heard it powering up again, and again and again, the one loud noise it makes is when it starts the hard drive going, the accelerating of the motor, (I would guess), and it was doing this constantly. It was late, so I just unplugged it until the next day.

The next day, I plugged it back into my Mac, and it was doing this constantly, still. The problem with this being is that if you are using it and it cuts out every minute, then the transfer is effectively cancelled, so you are really quite screwed, (excuse the term), with using it at all. This applied particularly in my case for time machine backups on my Mac.

The reason this is particularly frustrating is that all my files are still there, you can access them for short periods of time, and in fact, whilst I was preparing to send it off for replacement, I managed to get a few files off that I really wanted to keep, but now I am without backup until the replacement arrives, which I may sell on and get a new drive, because I cannot be bothered to deal with the same problem again.

Anyway, just my story, I am thoroughly disappointed with what is a fairly expensive product, (more so when I bought it a year back), to have such a quick 'death'.

I would not recommend this product, but would recommend thoroughly reading reviews here at amazon, and elsewhere too, to avoid this disappointment I had.

Charlie Styr

I have been using this drive as my Time Machine back up device for a month now. It worked straight out of the box with no problems whatsoever (most unusual for devices linked to Apple computers - everything is usually set to work with Windows). I have had trouble with WD built-in drives in the past so am keeping my fingers crossed regarding long term reliability. If you want to run Time Machine without hassle this is the one to go for.