JUL 24

Not to be a party pooper, but I had a 500 GB MyBook from Western Digital and it was flakey at best--I never knew if it would mount or not on my Mac. I also noticed that when I had the MyBook powered up, my cell phone reception would crap out. I get bad reception at my desk, so it might not put off that much interference, but it was enough to make sure I got zero reception. Maybe it's just the black MyBooks (or just the defective one I bought and then returned), but I thought I should post my experiences, just in case.

I have the same 500 GB MyBook from WD and I haven't really had any problems with it. I also have a MacBook and I haven't really had any mounting problems (well at first I did but I never have them anymore.) My cell reception is fine so it could just your drive? I'm sorry to hear about your problems though :(

Was unusually reluctant to comment on the title of your article because it looks so... unpretentious in its misspelling but oh-so-effective in its deliverance. Unit of storage is byte, and multiple units of storage carry a name when they are also a multiple of 1000: 1000 bytes is a kilobyte, 1000 kilobytes is a megabyte and so on... Point is that 1000 gigabytes (GB as an abbreviation) is a terabyte (TB as an abbreviation and yes, it has a single 'r' in its name), but the coincidence of 'green hard drives' and 'terrabytes' in the same article just calls for reasonable doubt on a possible extra meaning that I just cannot comment without awe and due respect. Thanks.

I work as a technician at a mac repair shop. We consistently see western digital drives failing very early in their duty cycle. They have gained a reputation as making the least reliable drives around. So is it really eco friendly if you have to replace your drive every year to year and a half? Not sure.

Thats just my 2 cents.

This is really cool. i never thought about a green harddrive before. Would any of these things lead to a better harddrive? or is just saving power?

Every MyBook i've encountered was very loud. I really like my LaCie :D

I have the above drive in the picture and I'd like to say it isn't that bad. If you're willing to void your warranty you can actually modify the drives and enable SSH on the device.

I wasn't too impressed with the speeds I was getting with the device using SMB, maybe something to do with the speed of the embedded processor. Even running on a direct gigabit crossover link to my Macintosh was slow.

I went ahead and installed netatalk (AFP, Apple's Filing Protocol for Linux) since I primarily am using this NAS with my Macs. Now that I am using AFP I am noticing a better throughput to the NAS, however it's not as fast as I would like it to be, I can copy files over quicker between my MacBook and iMac.

However in my setup, being in a RAID1 configuration for primarily backups of my Macs that run at night, this NAS is ideal.

No problems with interference with mobile devices, I still get full bars both on my phone and my HSPDA card while working around this device.

It's not bad, however it's not my first choice. I would have gone with something else.

By the way, if you choose to enable SSH on the device, and you don't use the WDAnywhere service, go and turn it off in the /etc/init.d startup scripts. Not having this running frees up some resources and you will benefit from it.

Forgot to mention one more thing, relating to the article.

I'm not sure if this drive is really eco friendly, maybe my setup is not allowing the drives to spin down however the fan is insanely loud on this device and it seems like the drives never spin down. I've only heard them spin down like once or twice in the past and only for a minute or so.

Luckily I am a heavy sleeper, otherwise I wouldn't be able to sleep around this thing, added onto the noise of my home server and Cisco router. :/

Tera has a single "r" but:
8b (bit)= 1B (byte)
1024B = 1KB (kilobyte)
1024KB = 1MB (megabyte)
1024MB = 1GB (1gigabyte)
1024GB = 1TB (1terabyte)
this is because 1024 is = 2^10

Disk drive manufacturers do not agree that the K, M, G prefixes mean 1024 (2^10), but rather 1000 (10^3, as in metric system).

Thus, 1000B = 1KB
1000K = 1MB
1000M = 1GB
1000G = 1TB

You lose approximately .2% at each jump. You get even less when you take into consideration that these are UNFORMATTED sizes. Thus, that 250 GB drive you purchase will only give you 239 GB formatted (using 2^10 units, as a computer would display).

Corrado, I can only assume you're replying to Héctor Ramírez. In this case, Héctor is more right, though you would be correct sometimes.

When computers calculate the size, 1024 is indeed use because computers work in binary, as Corrado pointed out. However, HD manufacturers have always worked using the standard metric names. This is why that new 512GB drive you just bought shows up as only as 476.8GB. No, you didn't loose 35.2GB, it's just there are 2 definitions of giga-.

(512,000,000,000 / (3*1024) = 476.8)

Hector, what the hell are you talking about? anyone reading this article knows how much a gb and tb are. and uhm, the size has nothing to do with POWER CONSUMPTION. Can you say dee dee dee beaner? haha. and seriously, did you not see in the article where it says "the first of these 1tb drives will be shipping this month" yeah, that means you have the REGULAR mybook - not the eco friendly ones. damn, do people even read these the whole way through before commenting?

Calm the hell down, people. Hector was talking about the misspelling of terrabyte because it contains "terra", the Latin name for "Earth", which makes it beautifully appropriate.

Also: officially, 1000^4 bytes is a terabyte, and 1024^4 is a tebibyte.

I just bought a MyBook a couple of months ago. Its done the job, but I wish I would have read this article first.

Wow, way to get OCD on the measuring space. For anyone who's still reading comments at this point, I bought a My Drive because others on the Ubuntu forums had had good luck with it and my network admin said he's had bad luck with Maxtors and good luck with Western Digital as far as cheap drives go.

Thank you for the correction guys! :) I totally missed that! :o even if would be disputable the HD manufacturers companies measuring methods since they are selling a 512GB which is recognized by our computers as a 476.8GB, all the files in our computer are measured in binary base. Computers work in binary, not in decimal! >:( I always thought it was just a format problem... :P
thanks again