One for the Mac crowd: A good price on a 1TB external drive with quad interface - Firewire 800/400, USB, eSata.
It's 2x500 GB drives as RAID 0/1 - but these can be replaced and/or upgraded with higher capacity WD Green drives later, if desired. In general, external drives with a firewire interface run above $200, and that's for a single drive. The Studio Edition range seems to get good reviews as well.
This is from the HT January 2010 catalogue.
does this double as NAS?
No ethernet interface - just direct connection to a computer. Could be connected to an Airport Extreme via USB and shared from there, if you have one of those.
Dude that's so cheap! Not sure if it will work as a NAS.
I wonder if you can change the RAID array to just a stripe for a massive increase in read and write speed…. Nice find, very very tempted.
Are you able to use the total 1TB capacity on these drives? Or can you only use them in RAID, so 500gig in total?
You can set it as either striped for a speedy 1TB, or mirrored for a safe 500GB.
I got the WORLD edition with Giga Ethernet port a year ago and the performance is really really poor.
On that particular device you can change the setting to RAID0 or RAID1.
Another note is that I needed to hack into the device to get ssh working in order to get rid of the WD bloatware that came with it. Otherwise, you will need to log in via the WD software to get to the data on the drive.
Hopefully this isn't the case with the STUDDIO. But after what I heard about:
http://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/20844
I'm not too sure…
Firewire is loads faster than ethernet on this class of devices - even USB will run rings around the standard mini-NAS box on a gigabit ethernet.
Just to clarify.
The part relating to the speed, is more for those who are looking at getting the NAS version of WB. You're better off with devices such as QNAP which has a much better performance than WD WB NAS. But you're right, direct connection (USB/FW) will always be quicker than ethernet.
The other point is relating to the built in software, which WD seems to be pushing really hard. If you look at the comments in the link I posted, they now have s/w inbuilt to the USB pocket drives at firmware level. Granted, WD did eventually release an updated patch to remedy this. I'm not sure if this would be the case for their STUDIO WB.
Otherwise, WD do make very good HDD.
Yes - I think this is a from the series with preloaded crapware on the disk where you can erase it, rather than built into the firmware like the latest generation WD stuff. If that's not so I'll make a note later - I'm about to fire it up…
@MildMax: Done. Out of the box it's striped, and doesn't need the WD software to work with the Mac. (The docs say you do need the drivers for Windows, but it said that about the Mac too, so YMMV). I needed to load the software on the CD only to change the RAID to mirrored, which took less than a minute. So, its all good.
Drive Genius shows sustained reads to the mirrored volume at 63MB/s and sustained writes at 73MB/s. Copied a 270Mb file in Finder to the volume in less than five seconds by my wristwatch - I'm happy. (All tested with the FW800 connection).
I went to the Hawthorn centre this afternoon and found they had plenty in stock. Got one, good price fast speed! +1
For all those going 'WD' meh…
I used to be really into my computers and my tech, could fix things plenty of others couldn't.
Right now…currently, as it sits, I wouldn't trust my data to anything else given a choice! WD would be my absolute first choice when it comes to a hard drive.
If it had Ethernet port I'd buy it in a flash
i just rang the call centre and placed an order for one, the sales guy said they are selling fast and they have recieved lots of orders for them already…dont miss out
Awesome find MildMax! Thank You! I was looking for a RAID FW 800 solution. Looks like it's now sold out.
wow that's cheap
apparently lots in stock as well around 40-50 at each store