20090318
WD My Book External HD
Since I can’t wait for the BluRay writers to come down in price (for both the drive and media) and I’m running out of space on my tini tiny 750GB OneTouch III, I picked up a 2TB External. I decided to go with the Western Digital My Book Studio (Striped RAID array). A coworker has 4 of these and they are very quiet. They are cooled convectively – no fans. I’m 140GB into my first copy and the drive is putting out a bit of heat and you can hear the faint whine of the 7200RPM drives – but only if you put your ear next to the drive. I moved my iTunes library (80+ GB) to the Maxtor and I can hear the drive running when I play the music. I suspect I’ll be moving the library over to the new drive soon.
JMZ said,
March 29, 2009 @ 1410
I moved everything over including the iTunes library. Actually I did not move the library, just all of the MP3 files the library points to. I had set up my library initially to leave the tracks where they were and did even that indirectly by using a directory link. Change the link and you can move the tracks anywhere and not lose all of the iTunes metadata associated with each track. I’m waiting for a longer, 2m, 1394b cable so I can tuck the 2TB external drive down inside my computer desk. It is pretty quiet with the new drive sitting next my monitor, but it will be essentially silent once I move it to the final location.