WD drops 4TB whopper
Supersize My Book
Like Burger King, Western Digital believes in whoppers; it's just announced a 4TB capacity My Book external drive.
Inside this My Book Studio Edition II is a pair of 2TB SATA drives with four interfaces to a host PC: eSATA and FireWire 800 for maximum performance, with FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 for more pedestrian and wide-ranging connectivity. The drives use WD's GreenPower technology to make them eco-friendly and are configured in a RAID 0 configuration, which stripes data across both drives.
The product uses a convection cooling design and has a power-saving mode. It's designed to not need a fan, and to therefore run more quietly than other external drives, as well as draw less electricity.
The product is formatted for Mac computers and compatible with Apple's Time Machine backup utility. With the RAID 0 feature, WD says the product is good and fast for creative professionals, workgroups, small offices and anyone else looking for fast data transfer. A WD spokesperson suggested photographers, graphic artists, videographers, and home video enthusiasts with video editing applications as likely customers.
WD says it comes with automatic and continuous backup software, and is user-serviceable, meaning that owners can open the enclosure and replace failed or old drives. There is a capacity gauge to show at a glance how much space is available in the system, and a five-year limited warranty.
La Cie has a 4TB external drive, the Ethernet-connected 2big network model with a 10TB big brother. The 4-slot Drobo can store 8TB using 2TB drives, and with firmware support for 16TB.
The WD product is available now with an MSRP for a 4TB version of $649.99 (£429.99 in the UK). The LaCie 2big is $319.99. The 4-slot Drobo is $499 without any drives. ®
COMMENTS
Would rather have this in RAID 1
These big bulky boxes don't really need the speed of RAID 0, especially if they're stuck with a USB 2.0 cable to run it through.
I'd much rather have the security of 2 TB of data, fully backed up without having to get an expensive 4-bay NAS or drobo solution.
Duh, dribble, mac user, duh, answers....
Someone called us Mac users simple and unable to grasp complex ideas....well I'll just go back to dribbiling and drooling onto my keyboard in my simple way, while I use my shiny, usable, no crashing 64bit O/S, with a shiny pre-compiz, pre-aero GUI, multi-filesystem supported hardware and O/S, major industry supported application aware, multi-button mouse, Unix based O/S, free developer kit on standard O/S release DVD, only $29 upgrade path to next release, Cider emu Windows game running, Intel CPU, GPL/FOSS/GNU software capable compiling, crap, simple, braindead O/S, while you...oh yeah wait for 2 files to take 6 hours to copy under Vista, crash just at 99% of any job, BSOD, SOB MS O/S on your self-built unsupported, knock-up bargain basement PC!
GO icon, 'cos, ermmm, I got confused as am a bit simple apparently......oh no got confused between red and green now....
re: Format time
There is a program called fat32format.exe available on the InterWeb that can put a FAT32 format on large partitions, saving the space wasted on the NTFS metadata file(s), and Windows (XP at least) can deal with really big FAT32 partitions.
I think the biggest FAT32 partition I've made was about 384 GB, but I think FAT32 can do 8TB.
NTFS has some advantages over FAT32: security and ACLs at least.
YMMV
Format time
@Mark y: You'd be right if it was only offered NTFS formatted, I didn't phrase it correctly.
Should have said it'd be better if it was available as HFS Plus as well as NTFS/NTFS2 versions on the shelves.
poor old Chris Harris
he made the classic mistake of saying that Apple Mac's are not as perfect as the sales guff makes them out to be. Bet he wont do that again in a hurry, eh?
However, I think your question still needs answering - if the device is just a HDD that shows up as an HDD when you plug it into Windows, then yeah, you probably can format it to NTFS.
Someone did point out that NTFS is only really suited to a Windows environment, which is true. But this shouldnt be a problem so much as the device doesnt appear to be a NAS etc. So, should you decide to brave this article again and dodge the Apple zealots, i hope this helps you out.
Paris, well, because
