Western Digital My Book Pro Edition II Doesn’t Suck!

I purchased this drive back in April 2007 even after reading this post where the author had bad experiences with multiple drives. As stated in my first post about the Western Digital My Book Pro Edition II, I liked the features of the drive and the price was right so I went ahead and purchased the drive from Costco knowing that they have a lifetime return policy on all products in store or online (since then they have changed policy to 90 days from purchase date for computer products and accessories).

I’m happy to report that I don’t think that the Western Digital My Book Pro Edition II sucks.

My environment is Windows XP Home, Windows XP Professional, and Windows Vista and I use drive via USB connected to a Adaptec USB hub. I don’t have a Mac and have never tried to use this drive with a Mac. I don’t why I have had better luck than others with this drive (knocking on wood) but below are some things I do/did that may have helped.

Reformatted to NTFS and Changed to RAID 1

This is the first external RAID capable drive I have owned. Normally, I would just plug a USB capable drive but I wanted to make sure I had RAID 1 setup correctly so I read the directions and followed the Quick Install Guide. I’m glad I did because this drive ships with RAID 0 and HFS+ file system and needed to be reformatted for Windows and RAID changed to RAID 1.

1. Install RAID Manager software
2. Connected drive to PC
3. Changed to RAID 1 (comes shipped with RAID 0 and HFS+ file system)
4. Ran Windows Disk Management Tool
5. Intialized Device
6. Partitioned and formatted drive (NTFS)

A full format took over an hour.

UPS Power

I have used an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) with the drive and I would guess it hasn’t been powered cycled more than a dozen times since it has been installed. Not sure how much of a difference this would make but it doesn’t hurt to use UPS power for any computing device with storage disk or moving parts.

Better Cooling

Anyone that has this external disk would agree that even during normal usage the air the is forced through the top vent is very warm (almost like a place heater). I copy huge files to/from this device almost everyday (1Gig + at a time) and noticed that my device was getting very hot. To help circulate air, I added rubber feet to bottom vent. Again, not sure if this is needed but with computing devices cooler is better.

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Filed under: Gadgets