'First it was the llB drive, but now, Western Digital has upped the
ante by sending us an external hard drive, with a size of gargantuan proportions of 2 TB-the My Book Pro Edi tion II.

Ruggedly constructed, this drive looks like an extra¬large reference book. The casing looks like aluminium, but is in fact a strong polymer. The drive has a push-button on one side that lets you take one-touch backup of your data in conjunction with the provided Retrospect backup software. This is a user¬serviceable drive-you can take out the two SATA II WDl0EACS SE16 drives inside and get them replaced yourself. The drives are configured so that you can either choose RAID mirroring for extra data protection or, RAID striping for speed and performance. RAID configuration is easy with WD's intuitive RAID Wizard software.





The My Book sports triple interface: USB 2.0, FireWire 400 as well as the ultra-fast FireWire 800 which has a fast throughput of 800 MBps. In fact, there is an extra FireWire 800 port that lets you connect more drives in a daisy-ehain, if one fine day, 2 lB does not suffice your ever growing demands, and the design of the drive lets you stack one drive over another.

Drive performance though not the best-is as good as we expected. It took about 45 seconds to transfer a sequential file to the drive and 40 to copy it back. Things speed up by about 40 per cent when you use the FireWire 400 interface.

The bundled Retrospect Express backup software can handle all the data backup tasks including encryption. You can schedule these tasks and it can even do a complete restore of your system if things go horribly wrong. A convection cooling system driven by a thermostatically controlled fan with a rubber frame (to dampen noise) keeps this setup cool. All the necessary data cables are provided, so you don't need to go looking around for them. The My Book is quite bulky,-1.93 Kg, for obvious reasons-and carrying isn't very pleasant. Even with 2 lB, the obscenely expensive price tag of Rs 45,000 will take a bite out of your flesh.

Specification:-
2 TB; 2xWDlOEACS SE16 SATA II
7,200 rpm hard drives; Latency: 4.2 ms; Read seek time: 8.9 ms; Interfaces: USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and FireWire 800; Cables: USB 2.0, IEEE 1394a, IEEE1394b; Dantz Retrospect Express backup software, Dimensions: 174.6 (H)mm X 159.3 (D)mm X 104 (W)mm; weight: 1.93 Kg.