WD outs 6TB monster drive
External HDD gets Raid treatment
Western Digital has upgraded its two-disk My Book Studio II external hard drive to a whopping 6TB of capacity.
Aimed at Mac fans, the drive comes formatted using the HFS+ file system. That makes it ready for Mac OS X's Time Machine auto-backup system.
You'll need OS X 10.5 Leopard or above - 10.4 doesn't support drives larger than 2TB. Nor does Windows XP, if you fancy using the drive with a PC. Vista and 7 are just fine.
Mac buffs won't be impressed with drive's eSata connector, but they'll be able to use the Firewire 800 port and the USB 2.0. There's a Firewire 400 port for older Macs. The My Book comes with Firewire cables.
It's a shame there's no Thunderbolt connection, but we're sure that'll come. Eventually.
WD wants $550 for the 6TB My Book Studio II in the States, so you're looking in the region of £400 here, VAT included. ®
COMMENTS
Not over firewire or USB!
Do a little more research next time before you call shenanigans: The Firewire and USB drivers only supported 48-bit addressing up until 10.5, because it's part of the USB 2.0 and Firewire 800 specs! Leopard introduced full 64-bit LBA drivers with USB 3.0 and FW 1600 support, and certain tweaks to its FW 800 drivers to support 64-bit addressing.
eSATA has a similar issue: Many older eSATA cards and mobos only support 48-bit LBA. All newer ones support 64-bit and use the OS SATA drivers, so you get support in 10.2.
Also, there are issues with GPT over Firewire even today, disks larger than 2TB can cause problems on some Macs even on 10.7.
So what ?
Yes, technically it is an array, but as far as the people this is targeted as, it's just a big drive. What's inside it doesn't matter - you plug it in (nice array of connections !) and big chunk of storage appears. If they've used decent silicon for the bridge ship, then I'd expect it to have fairly good performance.
Given the good selection of interfaces and the fact that it's an external "drive", then it's not even badly priced.
Mac Volume Limits
" 10.4 doesn't support drives larger than 2TB."
Incorrect.
10.0 & 10.1 had a limit of 2 TB
10.2 8 TB
10.3 16 TB
10.4 and later, 8 EB
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2422
