Since I am a huge fan of the Western Digital products (I think the SATA Caviar SE16 320GB drive with 16MB cache is one of the best drives I have ever owned, and I have them in all my music PCs and workstations, all six of them), I decided to see what WD had for external products.

As with many things mass produced, and the popularity of large media files in the consumer space, some of the retail-ready products for data storage are now priced competitively with the do-it-yourself approach. At first I planned to do what I usually do, buy a raw OEM drive (the non-retail version of product), buy an external USB/FireWire capable drive case, and build it myself. In recently deciding it was time to do some back-ups of back-ups of audio and imaging projects, and other valuable docs, and put them in a fire-proof safe - after somebody’s house burnt down nearby - I chose to look at external hard drives especially now that the 500GB size drive has approached the “sweet spot” held by the 320GB drive the past couple of years. You can never be too rich or have enough disk space, or be too paranoid about data back-up.

Wd my book external drive position