This is an UPDATE from my initial review.-----------------------------------After more than a year-and-a-half since my initial review (below), I can happily say that all is still quiet on the Western (Digital) front - which is great news - for me, at least.The "My Book Studio 1TB" drive still earns 5-stars from me. The drive is still as dependable and quiet as when I first purchased it. In my experience, this external drive has lasted the longest, and I certainly put them (I bought a second about 9-months ago) through their paces, and have nearly maxed to capacity one of the drives and it still and has always worked like a charm.That drive holds all of my video content, and copying to a from as well as playback has been without incident, as all drives SHOULD work. Ditto for the second drive: no incidents, no problems, no worries.For the record, my two drives are of the Firewire variety, and each is connected separately to my desktop computer (Mac Pro/ c.2009) and not daisy-chained, as I have some concerns when it comes to daisy-chaining external hard drives - mostly with regards to upload/download speeds, and also the sensitive nature of the files that I store. My concern is likely a holdover from past bad experiences with previous drives that crashed on me, and perhaps not an issue with these drives.And also for the record, I am going to add a third drive to my collection, that I will attach to the home network for the explicit purpose of playing media (movies, music) through my smart TV (either via Apple TV or Roku).So from my perspective, coming up soon on two years of use, these drives are incomparable, especially as prices drop for 1TB (and higher) drives.-----------------------------------My background: Long time Mac user with over 20 years experience in graphic design and multimedia (so data back-up comes with the territory), though am not so tech-savvy where I have the where-with-all to buy a naked drive and install it into it's own shell.The Quick Review: Bought it 6 months ago and so far love the drive. Smaller (physically) than I expected, which is nice if you have a crowded desktop. The drive is so quiet I literally cannot hear it even if I put my ear next to it. I cloned a re-bootable system and desktop hard drive and all files (208 GBs worth) to it to update my OS, and it did it flawlessly and fast (using FireWire). Sports a nice clean look, too. So far, so great. Time will only tell, but for now, love it and am a new fan.The Long review: I've gone through many a peripheral hard drive over the years, and had grown to like LaCie drives for my drive of choice, but it seems as drive capacity has grown, LaCie has tended to let me down. Two consecutive 1TB LaCie drives have crashed out on me, and each within a year of purchase (last one within 4-months). Fortunately I had most of the critical data backed-up on older, 500GB LaCie drives that still work well. After this last burnout (and my resultant anger), I figured I was done with LaCie and that it was time to shop for a new large-storage drive.My typical MO is to read as many reviews from as many different vendors and sites as I can, to try and glean as much info - usually both good and bad - about any one product. After reviewing NUMEROUS 1-3TB drives, I noticed the reviews for the Western Digital My Book Studio 1TB were mostly outstanding to good - compared to other WD drives, as well as other vendor drives. So after zeroing in on the WD My Book Series of drives, I delved further into the reviews and it seemed the 1TB outshined the others in the series, and reviews again were mostly glowing; there's ALWAYS some who have a middlin-to-bad experience, so that's why it is helpful to read as many (what we hope are) objective reviews as possible.After all the research, the WD MyBook Studio 1TB stood out among the crowd consistently, so thought it was worth the price to give it a try. And as mentioned above, love the drive, and am a new fan. Here's hoping it stands the test of time. I'll write a follow-up review in 6-months time, good or bad, which hopefully will be helpful to someone down the line.
