Western Digital has announced the immediate availability of a new 6TB Mac-formatted storage solution. Created with digital artists, graphic designers, photographers, legal and medical workers in mind, the dual-drive My Book Studio Edition II system is fully compatible with Apple Time Machine, supports RAID configurations, and benefits from four connectivity options. The drive bays are user-accessible for upgrades or maintenance, and there's a capacity gauge to keep you informed of how much space remains.
The 6.54 x 3.87 x 6.06-inch (166 x 98 x 154 mm), 5.2 pound (2.63 kg) My Book Studio Edition II dual-drive storage system represents a capacity increase of 33 percent on previous outings, and is presented Mac-ready (it can be used with newer Windows machines but will need to be reformatted – XP does not support drives with capacities above 2TB). It's a quiet storage solution due to the lack of cooling fans, having been designed for drives using WD GreenPower Technology, and as such it is said to consume a fraction of the power of standard dual-drive external storage systems.
Users who want to get the maximum performance benefits from the new system are offered eSATA (up to 3Gbps) and FireWire 800 (up to 800Mbps) connectivity, and FireWire 400 (up to 400Mbps) and USB 2.0 (up to 480Mbps) are also included for those occasions when flexibility is more important – no USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt, though.
Thanks to RAID support, users can choose to set the system to act as one big drive, or have one drive mirror the other for protection against hardware failure-related data loss. Users can access and swap out drives as required, and the solution also sports useful features like auto power-up and safe shutdown.
The 6TB My Book Studio Edition II dual-drive storage system is available now for US$549.99.