Introduction

As our world moves further into the Digital Age and more people, many of whom have little experience with computers, allow technology like digital photos and digital music into their lives, the need for low cost, high volume storage has grown. For many users, opening up their Dell or Gateway beige box is a not an enjoyable experience and some users wouldn't even consider it an option. For those of you that simply will not get in there, Western Digital has an external storage system for you that is both easy to use and gives you data protection like the pros use.

The Western Digital My Book has been around for a few years and has several versions in its product line. Prices range from just under 100 Dollars for the My Book Essential 160 GB to just under 600 Dollars for the Studio Edition 2 TB and features eSATA, USB 2.0 and FireWire connections.

Today we are going to take a look at the Mirror Edition, a dual drive external product that is available in 1 or 2 TB capacities. What makes the Mirror Edition unique in the over saturated external drive market is its ability to store data in RAID 1. The Mirror Edition in RAID 1 stores your data on two drives in full, giving you two copies of everything. Since hard drives can unexpectedly fail, rendering them and the data stored useless, it is important to keep a back up of the data you never want to lose.

The Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition is also capable of running in RAID 0, effectively turning the system into a 2TB hard drive that the PC sees as a single drive. In many situations RAID 0 is used for its performance benefits, but when passing data over USB 2.0 we will not see a performance increase. RAID 0 also does not protect your data on the My Book and if one drive is lost due to failure you lose all of the data.

Let's dive in and take a look at the Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition 2TB USB 2.0 external hard drive and see what it has to offer.