My Book Pro II Thoughts

I’ve been looking for a storage solution for the last few weeks to replace the 820 GB of failing hard drives that currently hold all of my important data. The drives currently reside in my desktop computer, with one of the 250 GB drives failing after about 18 months of use. The drive was in a RAID1 configuration with another 250 GB drive so I did not suffer any data loss. Because other parts of that computer have failed since then I’ve decided that it’s time to find a suitable replacement without breaking the bank on a new desktop. Why don’t I want a new desktop? A couple of reasons. The first being that my 3 year old laptop is also on the way out and I’d rather have a laptop for day-to-day use since I rarely use the desktop for anything other than data storage lately. The second reason is that I don’t want to administer two new computers when I can’t possibly use both at once. I’m going to keep the desktop around and use it as a database and/or application server until it fails completely. Until then I decided to get a storage solution and a new laptop.

For a time I considered getting a MacBook but ultimately bought a Dell Inspiron E1505 because my printers, scanners, cameras and other hardware don’t have OS X support from the vendor and for the same reason I’m not getting two computers I’m not getting a MacBook: I don’t want to invest the time in getting it to work with what I already have. I just want a computer that works with my stuff and that I can use to write software without investing a huge amount of time.

For storage I would have liked to find something that had 1 TB of capacity, at least RAID1 and attach to my LAN. Everything I saw that met those requirements cost about double what I was willing to spend. Capacity and RAID 1 were more important to me than the NAS capability so I looked at a few storage units that had Firewire and USB 2.0 connections. The best bang for the buck that I found was a Western Digital My Book Pro II from NewEgg.com.

I ordered it on Friday and had it on Monday. I’ve read a few reviews around the Internet that this thing is a total dud, being shipped with the incorrect power cable, dead drives and the unit being DOA. I also read a review that says that if the unit works it’s fantastic. I decided to take my chances and order it anyway and I have nothing but good things to say about it so far. The unit contains two 500 GB hard drives that can be configured in RAID 0 for high performance or RAID 1 for data redundancy. Since it doesn’t connect to my LAN and I don’t have any Firewire 800 ports I’m connecting to it via USB 2.0. Setup was extremely easy. It comes with a driver disk that contains a few other utility programs. One of them is a Western Digital RAID Manager program that allows you to set the RAID level and perform a drive format which is required if you’re using Windows. I haven’t used any of the other programs on the disk yet.

I’m happy with the speed of transferring data to the drive even in RAID 1 configuration. I don’t have any hard numbers yet but it didn’t seem like it took very long to copy 50 GB to the drive over USB 2.0. Because I formatted the drives with the NTFS file system I have read-only access under Linux. Sometime in the future I may decide to get it working with ext3 but probably not for a while.

So far I’m very happy with the My Book Pro II. Fast, cheap, lots of connection options, mildly portable and great capacity. Hopefully it doesn’t die while holding all of my daughters baby pictures. Tomorrow I’ll write about my new Dell.