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Review: Western Digital's
My Book Mirror Edition

Western Digital Wednesday launched the latest in its My Book catalog, the My Book Mirror Edition - - an effort to deliver a higher-capacity RAID solution to the desktop into a market with an insatiable hunger for more capacity and better management.

The Test Center took a look at an evaluation unit prior to launch and saw a device that could be nicely recommended.

The My Book Mirror Edition is an external USB 2.0 dual-drive storage system that offers RAID 1 (mirroring) to protect its contents and it is available in 1 TB and 2 TB models. Our evaluation unit was the 2 TB version which consists of two 1TB drives, preformatted as a single Windows NTFS partition and pre-configured for RAID 1.

As a quick refresh, RAID 1 is also known as mirroring because it stores an exact mirror image of one drive on another. What this basically means is that although there are two 1 TB drives in the device, they are both copies of each other and the user only has access to one Terabyte of space total. The advantage to this configuration is that if one drive fails, the data is still safe and sound on the other one.

If desired, the Mirror Edition can be reconfigured to use RAID 0, which distributes the data in a way that gives improved speed and essentially doubles the accessible amount of space, but at the expense of any data safety net.

Like most other drives in the My Book line, the Mirror Edition is housed in a sleek black case with a curved front that mimics the binding of a hard cover book. In the center of the front panel is an approximately two-inch-long blue LED that also functions as the status indicator, flashing at different speeds or moving up and down to signify what the drive is up to. Also like the others, it measures 6.54 inches by 6.06 inches by 3.87 inches and weighs 5.2 pounds.

Installed along with the drivers for the Mirror Edition is Western Digital's Drive Manager. This application places a small icon in the system tray that, at a glance, lets the user see the status of the drive, the percentage of space used, if the temperature is OK, and the health of the RAID volume.

From this icon, the RAID Manager application can be launched, which allows for the reconfiguration of the RAID volume (from RAID 1 to RAID 0, and vice-versa). It should be noted that whenever the RAID configuration is changed, all data will be lost.

Other included applications are a licensed version of WD Anywhere Backup, and 30-day trial versions of Memeo Autosync, and WD MioNet (which is the software the World Edition My Books use to allow users to connect remotely via the Internet). There are also free installs of Google (NSDQ:GOOG)'s Desktop Search, Picasa, and Toolbar.

During testing, the Mirror Edition installed smoothly. Designed to use only WD drives with Green Power Technology, it runs cooler than most systems thereby eliminating the need for fans. Because of this, the unit is extremely quiet. Although most of the unit remained only warm to the touch at 88 degrees Fahrenheit, the top reached a high of 114 degrees.

Testers found the included software simple to install and use. After installation, each program walks the user step-by-step through configuration in a wizard-like fashion. We did however have trouble finding the license key for the WD Anywhere Backup program. After contacting a Western Digital spokesperson for help, we found a tiny sticker, on the back of the Quick Start Guide (at the bottom, upside down). The spokesperson told us that they are hoping to eliminate the need for a key, or at least relocate it to a more obvious spot.

In other tests, we found copying files both to and from the drive to be very quick, with 1.2 GB of files writing to the drive in 2 minutes, 26 seconds and from the drive in 2 minutes flat.

The Mirror Edition would work well as a solution to someone in the graphics or design space, or to a customer who deals extensively with multimedia in desktop applications.

The My Book line of drives has been very successful for Western Digital. They are easy to use, stylish and there are editions preconfigured to suit almost any need. With MSRPs of $289.99 for the 1 TB model and $549.99 for the 2 TB, the Mirror Edition is no different and easily fits into the line. It gives both the casual home user and the SMB the opportunity to safely backup their data on a RAID system, without needing the technical know-how to make it work.

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