WD My Book - What's the Difference?

[esimantiras]

I'm contemplating buying a Western Digital "My Book" external drive. I see that there's a "My Book" (4Tb) and also a "My Book Mac" which tops out at 3Tb. I plan on formatting the drive before use but can't figure out what the difference is between the two drives. I'd prefer the 4Tb size…

Thanks for your help.
-Manny

 

[TattooedMac]

Western Digital make Ext HHD explicitly for Mac OS X, and this is what you are seeing the "My Book Mac". At the end of the day, there isn't really any difference, apart from the Mac "My Book" will be a Plug and Play Ext HHD, already formatted for OS X.
You will be able to plug it in, and straight away use it, without the need to format it. The other My Book, will be Windows compatible as well, and could well be formatted in MS Dos (FAT) or NTFS and will need reformatting to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) before you can use it for you Mac files.

So in short, nothing really.
Oh and welcome to the forums . . . .

 

[harryb2448]

G'day and welcome to the forums.

Buy the 4TB if prices are about the same. They will be identical except the Mac version comes +HFS formatted out of the box. Hook up the 4TB and go to Disk utility, highlight the drive, go to Erase and format Mac OS Extended (Journaled) which is +HFS.

 

[pm-r]

I have no idea why the "Mac" model would be limited to 3TB unless it's something to do with their included software which you don't even need, and I didn't notice any real difference in a review:
WD My Book and My Book for Mac Review | StorageReview.com - Storage Reviews

 

[bobtomay]

Wouldn't say it's limited, WD just hasn't gotten around to setting up a production line to format the 4 TB drive as HFS and package it separately.. And it could be they won't if there hasn't been enough demand from Mac newbs that don't understand they can buy any drive they want and format it themselves instead of paying WD to do it.

 

[IWT]

All the above postings are spot on. The only difference, if you can even call it that (or if you care), is that the Mac version comes with security and encryption software as part of the package.

You would lose that facility when you reformatted the Drive.

If all you want is an EHD, go for the 4TB version. Few folks are bothered by the security/encryption software which, of course takes up space and reduces the 3TB to something a little less (50MB or so).

Ian

 

[johnodd4]

Wrong again.

Let me explain the differrence.

Mybook: Windows/mac Use a standard drive controller board if the drive controller board fails basically the usb to sata board inside the my book fails you can transfer the drive out of the my book case into another third party case and recover your data.

Mybook: Mac only The difference here is that the drive controller board on this drive will only accept the drive it is currently connected to as well the drive controller board encrypt's the drives data so you cannot transfer the drive to another case to recover the data you have to pay Western digital to do this for you because you need the encryption key which was on the board controller interface.

This is why i recommend the windows/mac editions not the mac only editions to my customers and i have had no complaints.

I did however recently came across a hard drive a older my book i had sold to a customer that the drive controller had failed and we where grateful that we where able to recover the customers data because the drive was windows and mac compatible.

I highly recommend a nice solution though i use the my book cloud i am in fact currently looking to buy 3 more for major storage for all of my machines mac and windows. they are very fast and send data nicely and even work nicely with mac and windows.