Western Digital My Book Studio 1.5 TB FireWire 800/400, USB 2.0 External Hard Drive WDBAAJ0020HSL-NESN

Pros:
Fast Firewire 800 Works with most Macs
Sleek Design
Unique Status Display
Works well, low power, low heat, and well ventilated

Cons:
Intrusive WD SmartWare software
Plastic construction instead of Aluminum

Verdict:
This hard drive works flawlessly, so I gave it 5 stars despite the intrusive software. A nice external hard drive with some unique features, but the intrusive software might bother some users. There aren't a lot of choices for Firewire 800 drives for mac users, and this is certainly a sound offering with about twice the performance of the USB 2.0 connection.

Performance:
Doing some file writes by dragging large files and folders to the HDD, the USB 2.0 write times averaged about 35 MB/s and the Firewire 800 transfer times were about 63 MB/s, so it is definitely worth using Firewire 800 over USB 2.0. Power consumption is low and the drive is reasonably quite. It has no loud fans, but you do hear regular hard drive noises.

Usage:
Why is the software intrusive? WD decided to use a "virtual CD" that mounts whenever the hard drive is mounted. Also, use of their WD SmartWare program is required to use the drive. They do provide a tool to disable their software on some drives, but that doesn't work on the My Book Studio drive.

The drive was easy to setup and came pre-formatted as OS X Journaled. All I had to do is change a couple settings so the WD SmartWare software wouldn't open every time the drive mounted and change the label on the display on the drive to what I wanted. I use it as a Time Machine drive, which is setup by running Time Machine and selecting the My Book drive as the backup drive. Get more detail about Western Digital My Book Studio 1.5 TB FireWire 800/400, USB 2.0 External Hard Drive WDBAAJ0020HSL-NESN.