June 10, 2009, 10:25 AM — Western Digital Corp. today released its biggest consumer external hard-disk drive targeted at Mac users with a whopping 4TB of capacity.
The drive's $650 price tag may turn some off, but if you need space to fit 1,540 DVD movies, 800,000 digital photos or one million MP3 music files, then this may be the drive you.
The My Book Studio Edition II drive comes in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities and is designed with WD's GreenPower Technology, so the system uses about 30% less energy than standard WD drive systems and runs quietly because it doesn't need a fan.
The drive comes with a four ports, ultra-fast eSATA and FireWire 800, and FireWire 400 and USB 2.0, along with the accompanying cables.
It is compatible with Apple's Time Machine and includes software and instructions for reformatting to Windows operating systems. The system supports Mac OS X 10.4.10+, 10.5.2+ Windows 2000/XP/Vista: The 4TB version works with Windows Vista only because Windows XP does not support hard drives with capacities above 2TB.
The new My Book Studio Edition II two internal drives can be configured for RAID 0, which affords users the full 4 TB of capacity, or RAID 1, which mirrors the two drives to protect data in case of a drive failure but reduces storage capacity by half.
The new drive comes with a 5-year limited warranty.
