Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition Review

Western Digital is one of the best storage device manufacturers worldwide, it makes superb products which offer great value for money and also offer nice performance. The new Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition is a dual drive backup solution which backs up your data to two drives and mirrors it for extra protection using a RAID configuration. In this review we check out the Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition and see if it offers enough bang for its buck.

Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition Specs:

• Dimensions: 6.5 x 6.0 x 3.8 inches
• Weight: 4.2 pounds
• Capacity: 500 GB x 2
• Rotational Speed: 7200 RPM
• Read / Write Speed: 18.2 MBps / 13.1 MBps
• Connectivity: USB 2.0
• Price: $250

Review:

The Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition is a nicely styled device, and very closely resembles a gaming PC cabinet, just miniaturized. It is pretty compact at dimensions of just about 6.5 x 6.0 x 3.8 inches and weighing just 4.2 pounds. It is dressed in all black and is encased in a glossy plastic shell. When you power it on, the blue LED in the front lights up. The Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition has average read speeds of about 18.2 MBps but mediocre write speeds of just 13.1 MBps. It takes about 114 seconds to read a 2 GB file and about 158 seconds to write it back. While it lags behind in the read / write speeds, it also doesn’t offer additional connectivity options like Firewire etc.

The Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition 1 TB edition sports 2 500 GB drives in a RAID 1 configuration which mirrors your data on both drives giving you a double backup. This setup is very reliable because in case one drive fails, the other still holds your data. But it reduces the available space to just 500 GB. You can also switch to other RAID configurations using the RAID manager application to utilize the full 1 TB but lose the extra protection. It also comes with features like WD Anywhere Backup which lets you create automated backups and MioNet that lets you remotely access the data in another PC running the software. These two work only with Windows, but the Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition also comes bundled with Western Digital Backup software for Macs.

Pros:

• Dual Drive Backup
• Nice Design

Cons:

• No Firewire
• Slow Speeds

Our Rating: 3 / 5.