Hardware Review: Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition II 2TB

After a few months of deciding on what hard drive to get I decided to finally get myself a 2TB redundant hard drive. I opted for the Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition II 2TB (wow that was a long product name). It is the cheapest 2TB RAID-1 drive I could find (£149.99 @ Currys) but that doesn’t stop it from being pretty awesome.

The drive is a pretty simple one. 2TB on 2×1TB drives, connected to your PC with a USB cable. I didn’t look at much of the software because as usual I don’t trust software that ships with hardware. The only software I installed was the Western Digital Drive manager which allows you to setup the 2 drives as RAID-1. The raid setup gives you some in-build redundancy which allows you to use this drive for those files you just need to store somewhere secure.

Restoring on failure

So the reason why people buy this drive is because (like me) they don’t just wonder if their drive will fail, but actually when it will fail. So when it fails, you will need to replace the broken drive with a new one. So how do we do this?

It’s actually pretty easy, as is described in both the manual and the online FAQ. Just pop up the top lid, unscrew the little thumbscrew and replace the drive. Rebuilding should take about 5 to 15 hours depending on the size of the drive, and I think that’s about right (it took me 8 hours to copy all my data to the drive to start off with).