Western Digital My Book Studio Ed 500 GB

It might have happened a number of times that you were in the middle of

something extremely important, and up comes a balloon warning you about low-disk

space. Well, this won't happen anymore if you have the Western Digital MyBook

external hard drive which has a humongous storage space of 500 GB. Designed

primarily for Mac users, the device boasts of quad interface viz. USB 2.0,

FireWire 800 and 400 and eSATA, and can easily be re-formatted for usage on

Windows. The test unit which we got came in an elegant silver casing and the box

had the device, quick installation guide, mini USB cable, FireWire 800 and 400

cables and an AC adaptor. As soon as you plug the drive in, it's ready to use.

An interesting in-built feature called the martPowerTM prevents the drive from

being powered down until whole of your data has been written. It even drifts to

standby mode after 10 minutes of inactivity and wakes up automatically, thus

saving power. During operation, it emitted negligible heat or sound.

We tested it via its USB interface on an Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 2 GB

RAM using HDTach, HDTune and WinBench99 benchmark tests. In Business Disk and

high-end Disk Winmark tests of the suite , the drive returned 18

MB/s and 38.6 MB/s of throughputs respectively with an access time of 13.2 ms.

Its average throughput stood at 34.5 MB/s.

Bottomline: A good buy for professionals who

need something extra rather than just a mere storage device.

Ankush Sharma