( 5 reviews )
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Posted: Jan 10 2008
Like it says in the review title, I really WANT to like this drive. Unfortunately, I can't. I don't. And I probably won't. Ever. Why? I bought a 1Tb drive for media storage, and the 500Gb model for Time Machine. The drives mounted fine on my 24" aluminum iMac, but then the problems started. The drives would sometimes freeze when they went into suspend mode. Worse, OS X is too stupid to stop trying to access a "dead" drive, so the frozen drive would hang the system. I figured it was a fluke, so I did a hard restart on all my hardware. Same problems, so I changed cables. No luck. I even tried the firewire 400 and USB interfaces. The drives would still freeze, and still hang the system. I figured I just had a defective drive. No problem. I already had another 500Gb drive on order, so I sent the first back to the vendor and waited for the second to arrive. I had the same problems with the second drive, so it went back for a refund as well. The 1Tb drive started giving me the same problems, so I took the mechanism out of the WD case and put it in an OWC enclosure. Not surprisingly, I haven't had a problem since. So, why do I want to like this drive? Pros: - It's attractive - It's quiet (because it's fanless) - Quadruple interface (nice!) Cons: - It just doesn't work... WD is my first choice for internal drives, but they have some MAJOR problems with the My Book Studio line. Since other Mac users love them, I suspect that the drives simply don't like the new iMacs. Check the Apple Discussion Forums and you'll find lots of problems with them.
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Posted: Jan 7 2008
So far so good. I like this drive. It only came with on very basic sheet of info showing connection and warranty info. It was very easy to set up although, I would prefer more documentation. Both this drive and my MyBook Pro 500 GB drive don't completely turn off when I shut down my computer but, unplugging them seems to work fine once the system is totally off. Info I've found online wasn't much help in that regard. The MyBook Pro came with back up software by a company called Retrospect. It was a little complicated yet seemed fairly robust once I got the hang of it. I'm not sure why but, the Studio 1TB drive came with a backup software called WD Anywhere Back Up. It also has no real documentation...just the basic do this to set it up with no explanation of the theories and background of its inner functioning. I had problems with it although it seems to work basically (a little scary when you're talking about backing up your entire system). My main gripe is it was very difficult to find information on WD Anywhere Back Up because it really made by a company called Memeo and is really called LifeAgent which is their version of Memeo for Mac! This is not clearly spelled out anywhere and took me quite a while to figure out. Also, upgrades have to be verified by WD so there are bugs in the current release by WD 2.0.68 that have been fixed in Memeo LifeAgent 2.1.? that I can't. A few hours of my life I'd like to have back.
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Posted: Jan 7 2008
I bought this for use with OS X's "Time Machine" backup and find that it will periodically disappear from the desktop. Ten days later the program will alert me that it hasn't been backing up (there's not an obvious way to set an earlier alert) and I'll restart, but this is pretty disappointing in a backup device. Of course, it's possible that this is entirely an OS X problem.
