WD My Book Studio II 4TB review

Western Digital bills its My Book Studio II 4TB as the world's first 4TB external hard drive, but you can bet other manufacturers won't be far behind. Being first isn't the only thing this storage drive has going for it, though.

Encased in a fat version of the My Book Studio II case, the 4TB drive comprises two 2TB WD GreenPower hard drives configured as HFS+ Raid 0. Software included on CD allows you to reconfigure it as HFS+ Raid 1, or as Fat 32 Raid 0 or 1. It has four interface options: FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB 2 and eSata. Sadly, the last of those is still of minor interest to Mac users, as Apple has yet to add it to any Mac.

The USB 2 connection is sufficient for most everyday file reading and writing tasks, including backup using Time Machine or the supplied WD Anywhere Backup. However, if you're going to use it for video, you'll want to hook it up to a FireWire 800 connection. The Raid 0 configuration is a bonus for video users, as striping data across two drives results in quicker transfer of data, as long as the connection bandwidth isn't a bottleneck.

Like the rest of the My Book Studio range, this model doesn't have a fan, instead relying on it's ventilation holes to keep it cool. As a result, it's pretty quiet in use.

In our tests, the My Book II 4TB performed well, recording 60MB/sec average write speed for non-sequential 256K blocks, and 63MB/sec read speed for the same data over a FireWire 800 connection. Swapping that connection for USB 2 using the My Book II's mini-USB port and the supplied mini-USB-to-USB cable reduced that speed to 28MB/sec for writing and 34MB/sec for reading.

At more than £400, the 4TB My Book Studio II is hardly cheap, and it's almost twice the price of the 2TB version. However, 2TB drives are still relatively new and with no one else offering a 4TB desktop drive, it's not over-priced. Whether it's worth it or not will depend on how much data you have, and how quickly you need to shuttle it around.