I finally took the plunge and bought a decent sized external hard drive. Up until now I’ve hoarded away my movies & media on DVD’s but with the cost of storage media plummeting I decided to opt for one of these 2TB hard drives from Western Digital. The My Book Essential is a nice looking unit with a gloss black finish, rubberised feet to stop vibration and a front facing storage gauge indicating how full the drive is. The drive is nice and fast over USB 2.0 and does a great job of spinning down when not in use and even shuts itself down when I put the mac to sleep so is very conveneient.
The drive itself is pretty silent, and apart from the odd click I never hear it operating.
Formatting for the mac was simple and Disk Utility did a full format in around 10 mins. My first impressions of the drive are positive. I’ve already copied a lot of my media back from DVD’s onto the drive and in my quest for a minimal digital footprint I’ve disposed of the disks.
I’ve now used a terabyte of space, but all my disks are now archived on the drive so It’s just free to fill with movies & TV shows now. Now that I’ve got XBMC installed on the apple TV I’m allowing it to scrape the drive for all my media and adding it to the library which is very convenient. True on demand media, complete with movie posters, series information, actors etc. Superb
