Western Digital's My Book Mirror Edition is good value, and if the lack of transfer speed doesn't deter, then short of an NAS it's one of the better ways consumers can keep their data safe.
Design and Features
Western Digital's My Book Mirror Edition isn't the thinnest external hard drive there is, but this is a virtue of containing two hard drives. Housed in a piano black casing with perforated top, bottom and rear for airflow and a glowing blue light on the front, it does its best to emulate the shape of a hard cover book — although we'd suggest it'd look slightly out of place on a bookshelf. Two versions are available: a 1TB model for AU$349, and a 2TB model for AU$699, both with a three-year warranty.
The Mirror Edition is the first external hard drive from the big player that is user serviceable — that is, you can open it up and replace the hard drives yourself, should one of them fail. This is done by pressing down hard on the top near the front to release a magnetic clamp, then turning a key to unscrew a support bracket, then using a plastic loop to remove the hard drives. While the manual did feature the procedure, it wasn't intuitive and removal of the drives proved difficult, mainly down to the plastic loops which apply pressure to only one side of the hard drives and cause needless additional friction. Western Digital has a little further to go on the design front before user serviceable becomes user friendly.
The My Book takes the interesting stance of initially forcing mirrored mode upon users, meaning that everything that is copied to one drive gets copied to the other — so if a hard drive fails, you still have a working backup. We applaud Western Digital on this stance — however, we feel it needs to educate users even further on this, because if you don't understand RAID levels or the term "mirrored", then the box does very poorly to help potential purchasers understand what's going on. RAID 0 is also offered, and can be enabled through the included software — this merges the two hard drives together into one volume, and gives a performance increase — but if one drive fails, you lose all your data as a result, so we recommend you stick to RAID 1.
The upshot of all of this is that the drive requires extra power, and so comes with a power brick to do the task. It's not the most portable of solutions as a result, but it's not intended to be — rather this is something you keep on your desk or elsewhere to back-up those precious photos of your cousin's 14th wedding.
On the software front Western Digital bundles in Memeo AutoSync, which synchronises a folder's contents with another; a 30-day trial of MioNet, an online storage solution where you can access your files from any machine the MioNet client is stored on; and WD Anywhere Backup, a rebranded Memeo application which enables basic backup functions. Google has also thrown its money at WD, with Google Desktop, Google Toolbar and Picasa as optional parts of the install.
Performance
Sadly the Mirror Edition only features a USB port, meaning low performance in terms of data transfers. Copying an entire terabyte off this drive will not be pleasant, and Western Digital would have done better to include an eSATA port as well for those who have one, for higher speed transfers.
HDTach measured the drive as capable of 29.3MBps average read speed, 20.7MBps average write speed, 34.8MBps burst speed and 15.3ms random access time. Being USB-based the CPU took a hit, at 19 per cent usage.
Western Digital's My Book Mirror Edition is good value, and if the lack of transfer speed doesn't deter, then short of an NAS it's one of the better ways consumers can keep their data safe.
