+1, eSATA should have been tested. If you're not using Mac, that's what you'd likely go for. Then we would also have numbers for raw performance and useful comparison between R0 and R1. HDtune and/or HDtach over eSATA would paint a good picture.
Wow...I thought Firewire 800 would be faster than that. I mean not that it's BAD, but my Seagate USB 3.0 external drives (single drives that is, not in RAID or anything) sustain 95ishMB/s over USB 3.0, or of course 25-30ishMB/s over USB 2.0.
Really needs USB 3.0 for a new product like this, but still, this is kind of cool, assuming it works okay in Windows.
I wonder though...will ANY Western Digital drive just work in these going forward? Or does it have a list of drive IDs or something, and future drives won't work? (And is it only Green drives, or any?)
If ANY WD drive going forward (as long as SATA is around) will work, this would be pretty cool, even if I do prefer Seagate.
I'd be concerned about temperature too. The review referred to a max drive surface temperature of 51C, which I assume means the enclosure. However since the enclosure is plastic and doesn't conduct heat very well it's likely that the internal drives themselves are running substantially hotter. I think this would be good to know.
Some better fanless enclosures (for instance G-Tech) have heat conducting pads in contact with the drive, and aluminum enclosures with finned heatsinks. Although you obviously pay for this it seems like a worthwhile tradeoff for dependability.
we bought maybe 20 Western Digital enclosures 3-5 years ago for time machine backups. some Firewire, others USB. Got them at terrific prices :) All but 4 have died. :( Enclosure dies, sometimes the drive is recoverable.
We also bought 5 seagate enclosures with the board on the bottom in the stand, two failed.
our 4 G-tech enclosures that date back to IDE HD with the then maxed out 250 gig drives, only one has failed, and it was a hard drive failure, not the enclosure. The G-tech cost much more, but honestly its worth it. G-techs have fans.
Also Lacie has worked well for us too.
We now use a drobo for time machine, solving the revolving door of failed inexpensive hard drive enclosures.
I wouldn't argue with your personal experience at all but its not clear exactly what hardware you're referring to. Unless it applies to WD green drives, which are designed to run cooler than high rpm drives and hence designed to run without a fan it doesnt mean that much here. I was more wondering what fanless dual drive enclosures there are out there that are failing.
Personally, I have a 2-3 year old MBS2 attached by FW800 to a mini server, and it ventilates very well in my experience. I've never noticed it even a little warm, unlike the single MyBook Home drives I have which sometimes are quite warm. Packages like the WDS2 are designed to work together combining a cool running drive in an enclosure without a fan and that combo seems fine to me... Couple that widely quoted study showing cold dives fail more often than hot drives and I don't worry. I'm not at all saying one should slap a pair of 7k or 10k drives in a fanless enclosure obviously.
FWIW, I've seen dozens of drive failures in my life, but the only thing I've ever seen fail on an enclose is the fan itself.
I noticed it via an amazon comment. I plan to use these in an always-on mode hooked up to a desktop that's serving as a server in my house. The thought of the drive not always being propery available has scared me into looking elsewhere.
Have you guys ever considered doing a shootout with the main mac-oriented external raid-1 enclosures? There's the Newertech Guardian MAXimus, the OWC Mercury AL-Elite Pro, and (the one I'm most interested in) the Onnto Datatale RS-M2Q0. I would love to see that shootout!
WD externals is great, I used some and thank God they never fail me. But for this 6TB WD Mybook Studio, why not including hi-end ports for them?
No USB 3.0? No Thunderbolt? No eSATA? Oh please .. they say it's "Mac ready" .. well all new Mac now has Thunderbolt, and all PC now has USB 3.0
Why not including those, what's the RAID0 for then? FW800 still has not enough bandwidth for it anyway. I'd pay $100 more than it is today if they have those ports :(
Trusting data to this thing on two WD drives in RAID0 is like trusting Lindsey Lohan to return your borrowed jewelry, or Democrats to not raise taxes, or Uwe Boll to direct a good movie. You've been forewarned.
Repeat after me, RAID0 is not RAID, RAID0 is not RAID, RAID0 is not RAID. If you are trusint this thing for backups, you'd better switch it over to RAID1 as soon as you get it.
I just bought this drive today from Frys Electronics. I realize that the drive is rather old now, but seeing as that I don't have Thunderbolt on any of my Macs at home, I wanted to stick with Firewire. Originally on Firewire 800, I was getting 30-40MB/s. It was rather disappointing! Then I installed the performance drivers on the WD website, which contain drivers for 1394 and USB, and holy cow... shocked.
200-230MB/s for both read and write on RAID1 (mirrored), as well as with RAID0 (striped).
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mianmian - Saturday, September 10, 2011 - link
Only the slow USB 2.0 for such much storage?dingetje - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
yes usb2 for 6 tb is an amazing uber failhoue - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
True, but not investigating esata seems like a uber fail too.GullLars - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
+1, eSATA should have been tested. If you're not using Mac, that's what you'd likely go for. Then we would also have numbers for raw performance and useful comparison between R0 and R1.HDtune and/or HDtach over eSATA would paint a good picture.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
I'm out of town now for IDF but I'll get on eSATA numbers as soon as I get back :)Take care,
Anand
houe - Saturday, September 17, 2011 - link
update?Wolfpup - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
Wow...I thought Firewire 800 would be faster than that. I mean not that it's BAD, but my Seagate USB 3.0 external drives (single drives that is, not in RAID or anything) sustain 95ishMB/s over USB 3.0, or of course 25-30ishMB/s over USB 2.0.Really needs USB 3.0 for a new product like this, but still, this is kind of cool, assuming it works okay in Windows.
I wonder though...will ANY Western Digital drive just work in these going forward? Or does it have a list of drive IDs or something, and future drives won't work? (And is it only Green drives, or any?)
If ANY WD drive going forward (as long as SATA is around) will work, this would be pretty cool, even if I do prefer Seagate.
mlkmade - Saturday, September 10, 2011 - link
There is no mention of eSATA, probably the only connection that would help alleviate the bottleneck you're experiencing with raid-0 and firewire.So why did you only test the slower connections and let that determine the overall performance? No difference with esata?
mariush - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
A Firewire 800 card is about 40-50$ on Amazon.199$ + 50$ ... 250$ for 2 x 3 TB drives and the external kit doesn't seem so bad.
Death666Angel - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
Huh? Where do you get the $199 figure from? If you want this device with 2*3TB HDDs you need to spend about $379.As for the device itself, I don't see that much good. Only WD drives, no eSATA cable and it doesn't look like anything special.
Btw. does this drive support JBOD? Or are you limited to RAID0 if you want the full capacity of the drives?
mariush - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
No, it's my bad - I saw the Newegg link in article header but missed the fact that it was the 2 TB version (probably 2 x 1 TB drives).Didn't think it was worth replying to my own post.
Zak - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
Those are notorious for overheating even in single drive models.jb510 - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
Notorious? Care to back that up?NCM - Monday, September 12, 2011 - link
I'd be concerned about temperature too. The review referred to a max drive surface temperature of 51C, which I assume means the enclosure. However since the enclosure is plastic and doesn't conduct heat very well it's likely that the internal drives themselves are running substantially hotter. I think this would be good to know.Some better fanless enclosures (for instance G-Tech) have heat conducting pads in contact with the drive, and aluminum enclosures with finned heatsinks. Although you obviously pay for this it seems like a worthwhile tradeoff for dependability.
Etern205 - Monday, September 12, 2011 - link
Just buy a USB fan.viola!
Problem solve
http://www.geekalerts.com/usb-fan-with-led-light/
cobia - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
I can back that up, :(we bought maybe 20 Western Digital enclosures 3-5 years ago for time machine backups. some Firewire, others USB. Got them at terrific prices :) All but 4 have died. :( Enclosure dies, sometimes the drive is recoverable.
We also bought 5 seagate enclosures with the board on the bottom in the stand, two failed.
our 4 G-tech enclosures that date back to IDE HD with the then maxed out 250 gig drives, only one has failed, and it was a hard drive failure, not the enclosure.
The G-tech cost much more, but honestly its worth it. G-techs have fans.
Also Lacie has worked well for us too.
We now use a drobo for time machine, solving the revolving door of failed inexpensive hard drive enclosures.
jb510 - Friday, September 16, 2011 - link
I wouldn't argue with your personal experience at all but its not clear exactly what hardware you're referring to. Unless it applies to WD green drives, which are designed to run cooler than high rpm drives and hence designed to run without a fan it doesnt mean that much here. I was more wondering what fanless dual drive enclosures there are out there that are failing.Personally, I have a 2-3 year old MBS2 attached by FW800 to a mini server, and it ventilates very well in my experience. I've never noticed it even a little warm, unlike the single MyBook Home drives I have which sometimes are quite warm. Packages like the WDS2 are designed to work together combining a cool running drive in an enclosure without a fan and that combo seems fine to me... Couple that widely quoted study showing cold dives fail more often than hot drives and I don't worry. I'm not at all saying one should slap a pair of 7k or 10k drives in a fanless enclosure obviously.
FWIW, I've seen dozens of drive failures in my life, but the only thing I've ever seen fail on an enclose is the fan itself.
marcreichman - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
I've always been interested in these enclosures, but I have read about a sleep issue with this line of drive and macs when using the drive over fw800, due to the way this drive handles powering on/off/sleeping when the computer goes off or on. I think it's covered in these two KBs:http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/16...
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/16...
I noticed it via an amazon comment. I plan to use these in an always-on mode hooked up to a desktop that's serving as a server in my house. The thought of the drive not always being propery available has scared me into looking elsewhere.
Have you guys ever considered doing a shootout with the main mac-oriented external raid-1 enclosures? There's the Newertech Guardian MAXimus, the OWC Mercury AL-Elite Pro, and (the one I'm most interested in) the Onnto Datatale RS-M2Q0. I would love to see that shootout!
Hrel - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
Fuck Applebollux78 - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
why didnt you test esata? just to say that apple is better cause it has fw800??iSayuSay - Monday, September 12, 2011 - link
WD externals is great, I used some and thank God they never fail me. But for this 6TB WD Mybook Studio, why not including hi-end ports for them?No USB 3.0? No Thunderbolt? No eSATA? Oh please .. they say it's "Mac ready" .. well all new Mac now has Thunderbolt, and all PC now has USB 3.0
Why not including those, what's the RAID0 for then? FW800 still has not enough bandwidth for it anyway. I'd pay $100 more than it is today if they have those ports :(
oyabun - Monday, September 12, 2011 - link
I concur that you should test with eSATA as well, the review is not complete without it, regardless of the "Mac-ready" moniker.Googer - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
Why no e-sata benchmarks? Perhaps that would have yielded better results than FW800.ShangoY - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
Trusting data to this thing on two WD drives in RAID0 is like trusting Lindsey Lohan to return your borrowed jewelry, or Democrats to not raise taxes, or Uwe Boll to direct a good movie. You've been forewarned.Repeat after me, RAID0 is not RAID, RAID0 is not RAID, RAID0 is not RAID. If you are trusint this thing for backups, you'd better switch it over to RAID1 as soon as you get it.
DaveLikesHardware - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
When looking at NAS-like hardware there are two criteria I use to determine if the product warrants a second look:1) 2 hard drives (check)
2) Network connection (nope)
This seems like a niche product for artists and media collectors.
Wake me up when you review a home version rather than personal.
On a side note, I remember seeing a picture of a 6-story, 15-GB, robotic "storage array" at NASA. Now you can practically have that on your desk.
kevinelliott - Thursday, January 31, 2013 - link
I just bought this drive today from Frys Electronics. I realize that the drive is rather old now, but seeing as that I don't have Thunderbolt on any of my Macs at home, I wanted to stick with Firewire. Originally on Firewire 800, I was getting 30-40MB/s. It was rather disappointing! Then I installed the performance drivers on the WD website, which contain drivers for 1394 and USB, and holy cow... shocked.200-230MB/s for both read and write on RAID1 (mirrored), as well as with RAID0 (striped).
Very happy here.