My Book Studio Edition II

While we await more Thunderbolt storage devices, Western Digital grabbed headlines not too long ago for the announcement of its 6TB My Book Studio Edition II Mac-ready external drive. The two-bay external enclosure features two 3.5" Western Digital Caviar Green drives and is available in 2TB, 4TB and 6TB configurations. The drives are priced at $249, $399 and $499 respectively although street pricing is significantly lower. I saw the drives going for $179 for 2TB, $303 for the 4TB configuration and $379 for the 6TB model at Amazon. By default My Book Studio Edition II implements a RAID-0 across its two internal drives, although Western Digital's software lets you convert that to a RAID-1 (at half the capacity) if you'd like. Read on for our review.