Sunday, December 1, 2013

WD My Book Studio 2TB External Desktop Hard Drive with Metal Enclosure

Quiet, fast, reliable and nice to look at
This Western Digital MyBook Studio is a 1TB external hard drive with a 'wall-wart' power supply, and connections for both Firewire 800 and USB 2.0. In operation it is quick and quiet, and has the added benefit of powering down when not in use, thus entirely eliminating the noise. It's good-looking in its brushed aluminium enclosure, and also comes with some useful drive management and backup software, which you can use if you like. The drive is Mac formatted out of the box, though you can easily reformat it for Windows if you prefer.

This is the second Western Digital My Book sitting on my desk. It nestles next to its big brother, the dual-drive RAID based version. I mention this because, over the years, I've never had a Western Digital drive fail on me, either internal or external. This is quite an achievement, seeing as I've been through a dozen LaCies, Maxtors and others of more or less high-brand prominence, all of which have failed me sooner or later (some very soon...

WD My Book Studio 2TB External Desktop Hard Drive with Metal Enclosure

Good stylish external drive
This has been attached to a MacBook and is performing well. The firewire cables are a huge bonus as they speed up download times dramatically and the box includes 3 different ones so you should be sorted. The drive is quiet and 1 TB should be sufficient for most users' needs.
The external styling is nice - in many ways this looks like a silver book so it would sit on a shelf very discreetly.

Set up was simple - plug in and start up and go, so excellent in that respect.

The only reason it didn't get 5 stars was that the plug which came with it was a european one not a UK one, and the leaflet seemed to suggest that there should be multiple plug options in the box (which would have been excellent).

Assuming that the plug is sorted out, I would definitely strongly recommend this stylish, quiet and effective data storage unit.

WD My Book Studio 2TB External Desktop Hard Drive with Metal Enclosure

Great looking and works instantly on a Mac
This is undeniably a good looking product with a sleek design and a very cool metal enclosing it certainly looks the part and with very little noise it sounds the part too. Recently had so many problems having to download software and run updates when purchasing new products for my Mac that it was so refreshing when you simply plug this in and it works instantly. The only instruction leaflet basically says plug it and turn it on. Comes with some interesting software (which does not run on OS 10.4.11) though you don't need to use it. I needed the Hard Drive for backing up and storing massive Full HD Video files for my work and it has been a huge benefit. Comes with both a USB 2.0 lead and a Firewire 800 cable. I have it connected via Firewire 800 and it is unbelievably fast, transferring 100's of gigabytes in less than an hour. The plug and cables are of a high quality and it arrived well packaged and on schedule. When I read that it powers down when not in use I was disappointed as I...

Click to Editorial Reviews

Verbatim 47425 8GB Micro USB 2.0 Flash Drive - Blue

Great Product
smallest USB drive i have ever seen, means you can always carry it with you on your keys... and seems very durable, due to it not having the metal sheild around the connection like most usb's, previously i have experienced these things get bend and no longer fit the computer.

product is brilliant value for money!

Verbatim 47425 8GB Micro USB 2.0 Flash Drive - Blue

even tinier than imagined
I bought this for my dad so he could transfer photos from the PC to a digital photo frame. Though the frame has slots for all types of photo cards, using a faster USB stick was preferable and less faff at the PC end. However, a typical USB flash drive would be so big as to stick out and be visible hanging off the side of the photo frame, so I looked for the smallest one available. I was still surprised when it arrived at just how tiny this thing is, and it ensures that it just stays out of sight.

One thing I was pleased to see is that on the back of the packet there is explicit reference to 'Linux 2.4.0 or higher' amongst the supported operating systems. There is no reason why the vast majority of USB flash drives would not work on Linux out-of-the-box, but it's good to see the manufacturer has bothered to list it anyway for buyers' peace of mind.

So far it seems to work fine, but requires insertion upside down on the PC USB port. There is a short cable supplied...

Verbatim 47425 8GB Micro USB 2.0 Flash Drive - Blue

Excellent little thing
I have this on my key ring so that I always have a USB stick to hand.
Really small size and a really decent capacity.
Copied a single 2.23GB file from PC to USB in just under 5 mins.
Copied a single 2.23GB file from USB to PC in just under 1.5 mins.
Copied a 2.11GB folder holding 1,787 items in 9 folders from PC to USB in 15 mins.
Copied a 2.11GB folder holding 1,787 items in 9 folders from USB to PC in just under 2 mins.

Seems like pretty decent read/write speeds to me, especially for what looks like a sliver of plastic on my key-ring! :-)

Click to Editorial Reviews

Verbatim 47419 4GB Micro USB Drive - Pink

Intenso 3502480 32GB Rainbow USB 2.0 Flash Drive - Transparent

Roomy, and Good Value
I'd never heard of Intenso before today, so I thought I'd give them a try. This is a pretty good USB pen, which holds 4GB and is compatible with all the OSes available today, Linux, Mac and Windows.

This pen is quite slim - about as thick as the USB socket is, and has an easy to remove cap. There is a keyring holder at the back, so you can just put this with your keys for safekeeping, personally I wouldn't because it's easy to break them. The colour is more of a grey/green - but it doesn't say it's 4GB on it's body, which isn't good. Sometimes I use the size as an indicator of which pen to use.

The pen is easy to use, just put it in your USB socket and off you go. It allows you to store 3.87GB with the way Windows reports sizes, but you'll see it's 4,000,000,000 bytes.

You can store whatever you want, and you can even use it to transfer stuff to your PS3, and other devices. I even was able to transfer to my Freeview+ box. It should hold about...

Intenso 3502480 32GB Rainbow USB 2.0 Flash Drive - Transparent

Unreliable and slow
I bought this memory stick (not from Amazon) around 4 months ago because of it's large capacity. Right from the start I was disappointed by it's slow read and write speeds (on PC and Mac). It also dropped connection during large file transfers (became unaccessible from My Computer or Finder), which made it completely useless for what I wanted it for. And now it's totally broken - it shows up in My Computer but you can't access it, nor format it. As far as I can tell it's dead as a dodo.

I won't be buying another one of these. I'll go with bigger-brand sticks from now on.

Intenso 3502480 32GB Rainbow USB 2.0 Flash Drive - Transparent

Respectable Flash Drive
I've owned quite a few USB Flash Drives over the years, only to loose most of them. Other than this Intenso, I've used ByteStor, Buffalo and SanDisk Flash Drives. Unfortunately, I could only benchmark test the two I had, and found the results of the Cruzer from an external source (although, I will update this review if I find the others). Here are the results:

Intenso Rainbow 8GB Flash Drive (

Verbatim 44048 4GB Micro USB 2.0 Flash Drive - Black

Intenso 3502460 8GB Rainbow USB 2.0 Flash Drive - Transparent Green

Verbatim 47424 8GB Micro USB 2.0 Flash Drive - Hot Pink