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Digital Camera News, Reviews and Tips

 

WD Unveils My Book Studio with USB 3.0 and 4TB Capacity

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WD USB 3 My Book Studio

Western Digital is adding to its My Book Studio line with a new 4TB drive that features a USB 3 interface.  The new unit retains the single drive form factor in 1TB, 2TB, 3TB and 4TB flavors.

The new USB 3 drives are Mac formatted out of the box for compatibility with the newest Macs that now offer USB 3 (of course, they are also backward compatible with USB 2.0).  Accordingly, the new drives are compatible with Apple Time Machine and they offer 256-bit hardware-based encryption for added security against unauthorized access to the drive and its contents.

Pricewise, the My Book Studio 1TB is $159.99; the 2TB is $189.99; the 3TB is $239.99; and the 4TB is $299.99.  The new drives are already available on Western Digital’s website and I expect them to show up soon at B&H Photo.

WD My Passport Studio 2TB Portable Hard Drive Review

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WD My Passport Studio 2TB

The latest bus-powered compact drives are available in capacities up to 2TB.  If there’s one thing that photo and video shooters can’t get enough of, it’s storage space for the growing file sizes we’re dealing with.

The new Western Digital My Passport Studio drives for Mac users sleek and compact (particularly when you consider we’re getting 2TB of storage).  WD recently sent me a pair of the new drives to try out.  The drive’s external shell is mix of silver and black aluminum, which goes along nicely with the current MacBook motif.

As with with recent iterations of Western Digital’s FireWire 800 drives, the new My Passport Studio drives sport dual FW800 ports, allowing you to daisy chain multiple devices and only use a single port on your computer. [Read more…]

Western Digital My Book Thunderbolt Duo Drives Now Shipping (Finally!)

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WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo

We’ve been waiting a long time for this one folks – an actual, shipping Thunderbolt external hard drive for mere mortals.

Western Digital has announced pricing and that it is now shipping 4TB and 6TB versions of its My Book Thunderbolt Duo external hard drives.  I first looked at these at CES 2012, while they were still getting them ready for final production.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyt6jwohQ_M&w=640&h=360]

The dual-drive system is configurable as a RAID 0, RAID 1 or JBOD.  As a RAID 0 drive, the Thunderbolt connection puts a single unit in the 280MB/s transfer range.  Additionally, a daisy-chained series of 6 drives configured in RAID 0 will deliver transfer speeds up to 780MB/s.

The 4TB model is priced at $600, while the 6TB model is priced at $700.  WD says it is now shipping the drives.  Check B&H Photo, Amazon and WD’s online store for availability. I should have my hands on one soon and will report back as soon as I get a first look at its performance.

More info in the full press release below. [Read more…]

Western Digital Storage Products at PhotoPlus 2011

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WD Gear

I caught up with Matt Bennion at PhotoPlus 2011 and talked to him about some of the recent products from Western Digital.

I’m very excited about the My Book Live, which I talked about when the WD 2go App was announced a couple months ago.  The update through the WD 2go App for the MyBook Live drives gives us so much power to freely share large files without the need of some middleman charging us for another storage or transfer service. [Read more…]