Western Digital: My Book Studio Edition 2

Depends on what kind of protection you want. TM is generation 1 software and for some of us has a few issues. I'm currently using a number of different methods which includes TM as well as a regular backup program. Redundancy is a good thing.

For that one drive TM will do the job although I don't care for WD externals. Too many problem reports on web discussions. Try a TM backup and see if it is successful then you are good to go. Do not use TM as your sole backup. Duplicate the backup elsewhere.

Hey there DNA1977 - I don't have an answer for you (though I guess your qu is answered now) but I do have a question about the My Book Studio II and Disk Utility.

The manual for the drive says it can be configured as RAID0 or RAID1 but I'm interested in using JBOD so that I get 1 volume per drive (will use 1 for data and 1 for TM backup). Do you know if this can be done?

thanks in advance for your reply.
Raf

As far as I have tested, I don't think you can use it in "JBOD" mode.

Also I think JBOD isn't the accurate term for the scenario you've described as "1 volume per drive". With "real JBOD", the RAID controller combines the spaces on all "physical drives" and only presents the OS with 1 single drive. You could split that single drive equally into 2 volumes with DiskUtil but that wouldn't guarantee the data being split equally onto the 2 "physical drives".

I found this limitation of being able to use only RAID0&1 little disappointing because that means you could either have a protected volume at the size of only 1TB, or a risky volume at 2TB knowing you could suddenly lose ALL of that data...

We certainly need something in between, I hope there might be a firmware update to make this possible.