One of things that irritated me about external USB/Firewire hard drives for a long time was that they stayed on when the computer they were attached to went into low-power sleep mode. Fortunately, it turns out that the Western Digital My Book line of external hard drives are smart. They not only place themselves in a low-power sleep mode when the connected computer goes to sleep, but they also go into a low-power mode when they are idle. They come out of sleep mode fast enough not to be annoying.

I’ve used two models with both a Windows PC and with a Mac. The Premium series has both USB 2.0 and Firewire interfaces. The other models only have USB 2.0 interfaces. The two models below (Amazon affiliate links) have photos of the units. I haven’t bought the 1TB model yet. But, its interesting that it is the first low cost (relatively speaking) consumer external drive I’ve seen that provides a dual drive mirrored environment.

Western Digital My Book Premium 500 GB External Hard Drive with Dual Interface ( WDG1C5000N )

Western Digital 1 TB MyBook Premium External Hard Drive 1394A/USB 2.0

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 23rd, 2007 at 10:36 am and is filed under Gadgets, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.