The faster, cheaper, cooler-running WD My Book Studio

Stop reading now if disk drives bore you. You might be able to find some articles up here about storage disaster recovery, because if disks make your eyes glaze over, you’re likely to recover from a disaster. Knowing the basics about disks for your Mac is as important as knowing a cholesterol score. A slow score, or a low score for your drive is going to attack the heart of your business: your data.

That’s why I was glad to review the improved model of the Western Digital My Book Studio. I found it faster, running cooler and a better value than a drive I bought at the start of the year.

The price of external drives, which you plug into your Mac, has dropped dramatically since I last bought a drive. Just seven months ago I paid $140 for a Mercury Elite AL Pro 1.5TB drive with two kinds of interfaces, two FireWire 400, and one USB 2.0. The 3TB My Book — twice as much storage — costs $200 at Amazon.com for three kinds of interfaces, two Firewire (either can be used at 400 or 800) plus a USB port. (The wider range of interfaces to plug in, the better. Your more modern Macs are now shipping with fewer ports on them, and it’s good to have non-USB port choices on the back of a drive.)

One of the biggest upgrades to this My Book — I now run a two-year-old 1TB My Book for Time Machine backups — is the new case. It’s morphed from plastic to aluminum, so it stays cooler. Cool means quieter, and this drive is so cool it has no fan. No fan is one less moving part to break down, plus less electricity to purchase.

I ran speed tests against this newest My Book. A massive file transfer that took 6 minutes, 53 seconds on the older My Book completed in 5:37. That’s about 20 percent faster, time that can really add up in an era when big files of 10MB or more — think recorded Skype calls. or the size of your iPhoto Library — have become commonplace.

What would you need a big, honking 3TB drive for? The top use that I can see for most business users is a multiple-year Time Machine backup drive. It took me less than 18 months to fill up that 1TB My Book with TimeMachine backups. After a fill-up, Time Machine starts deleting older backups. Sometimes it does this with nary a warning.

You’d like to have something bigger to delay that day when you avoid the accidental deleting, and so need to swap in a replacement drive. You see, in the old days we used to back up to DVDs or some other plastic, but now most backups go to these external drives. You the stash away the disk hardware like you would DVDs. Elbow room is important on backup disk drives.

Speed is also important, too. Time Machine, which one of the best default backup programs, cranks through a lot of data to pluck out that file or folder you’ll want out of a backup. The faster the drive, the less time you wait. You’ll also see a faster drive taking less time to do a backup. No matter how you set Time Machine, when it backs up there’s a hit on your Mac performance, even if it’s just twice a day.

Western Digital also provides SmartWare backup software for the Studio drive as part of the purchase, but frankly I didn’t find that it delivered any more than most of the drive makers’ backup solutions. The interface is unfamiliar and complex, the speed is no better than Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. And what you get requires you to use the WD Software for restoring — plus it runs in the background all the time. Not my first choice, even if it says it provides complete backup all day long of everything.

There’s another ding on that WD backup software — the files it creates have odd names, with “@0″ added to each name. This helps the SmartWare find and restore your files. But any backup tool that includes an “uninstall” utility is too deep into my Mac’s file system.

The included software is no deal-breaker while choosing and using the bigger and better My Book Studio. Faster and bigger means you can partition that drive into multiple uses, so it might include a section for the new Lion OS, as well as a slice to do nightly clones onto. I’ve even got a Time Machine section that’s 50 percent larger than the WD My Book that’s almost full now.

Western Digital’s brand has a good heritage and a fine track record for reliability. WD makes many of the internal drives shipping in PCs and laptops today. For $250 you can stop thinking about the need to add drives for several years. Then you can turn your backup focus to the next wave of Web-based storage choices: CrashPlan, DropBox and even Dolly Drive, which can send your TimeMachine backups into the clouds.

Five places to do a better disk upgrade than inside

Mac accessory supplier iFixIt is selling a solution to add two bigger drives inside the well-sealed-up Mac Mini. The concept means cracking the case on this half-shoebox sized computer and replacing the Superdrive with a faster and bigger disk. No more CD/DVD option after this.

Any plan to crack a Mini for this is crackers. The Mini runs without a fan and manages to keep itself cool enough to keep operating. But the back of that little miracle is warm-plus with just one drive running inside. With a Firewire 800 port on the back, putting another heater of a drive inside asks for trouble that Apple won’t fix.

Upgrading the memory inside is a different, better reason to use a putty knife to get that case open. Apparently once you get 2GB of memory inside, the Mini can recognize 256MB of it for better graphics performance.

But adding that memory happens one of two ways: You buy the $799 unit from Apple in the sealed and warranteed case, or you get inside to beef up the $599 model to 2GB. Just because you or your geeky pal can do something like update memory for you doesn’t mean you should. Saving $200 on the cheaper unit (well, about $175 after you buy the extra memory) could cost you later in warranty. The smaller the Mac, the more chance it will need Apple’s service if something goes awry. It’s close quarters inside there.Or get that geek-pal’s number and a backup system for when the Mini gets to be hot stuff. Cooling is an overlooked part of keeping computers happy. You could crank up your air conditioning to Stun, but that would spend the same $175 in the power bill. Seems safer to leave the insides to the Apple on this Mac.

Adding those bigger replacement disks also seems like a lot of work for not much boost to the computer. Agreed: The Mini’s built-in disk is a slowpoke at 4200 RPM. But the replacement disks only run about 30 percent faster while they add that heat. It’s a plastic case, friends. Leave the extra storage outside, attached to one of the five, count ‘em, five ports, USB 2.0 or Firewire 800.

Time Machine gets the vote here for the newer systems (those running Leopard). Yes, it takes a little trick to get a Time Machine drive ready to boot up in case of a crash, but it’s worth it. Mac OSX Hints has the process here. Well worth the time.

As for Retrospect: Yes, as a business we’ve used it, but it takes tinkering. I’ve probably spent the equivalent of 10 hard drives in rewritable CDs and then DVDs staying backed up. It might be worthwhile to have several hundred versions of the InBox from your e-mail program, but I’ve only looked at a handful of these snapshots over a decade. SuperDuper is far superior to keep a current version of your drives backed up. At $29, it’s too cheap to overlook.

Once a week I schedule a Retro backup onto the DVD plastic. I’m not sure why, but there’s all those years of habit.

Offsite storage is good. I use CrashPlan on the newest iMac and BackJack for our Tiger systems. Each is about $45 a year for storage over the Internet to a remote server. The latter is great at telling you what it’s doing, right down to an e-mail verification. It works the way Mozy did here during 2008, until EMC (them again!) spoiled its Mac interface.

Just this morning I read of another method for offsite backup: Find a Mac buddy who you can have coffee with once a week and swap backup hard drives with them. Do a Carbon Copy Clone of your drive before you go have your grande latte. That way you’re at worst only 7 days behind on a backup in case of a fire. Be serious about the relative value of an offsite backup in the aftermath of a fire. A billboard near my office reminds me that more than 4 out of every 5 businesses — small or large — cannot resume operations after a disaster.

A modest bump on Macbooks from 160 GB to 320 GB drives the price up by $200. Paying an extra $200 for a drive that costs under $100 certainly makes the installation sound like it should be expensive and difficult. But upgrading hard drives is easier than it’s ever been for a Mac in the Macbooks. Apple has put the disk drive access under an easy-to-snap-off cover.

Save the money and order a drive from a third party company like Other World Computing. Let the customers who don’t enjoy integrating to save money pay the extra price. As Alan Dang says in the Tom’s Hardware blog,

In general, these [included Macbook drives] are run-of-the-mill notebook drives, and we recommend upgrading to aftermarket drives. Time Machine makes it extremely straightforward to migrate your computer from one drive to another (provided that you have an external drive). One good choice is the Seagate Momentus 7200.4.

If you really must have Apple integrate a bigger drive, consider jumping up to the 2.4 GHz model of the Macbook Aluminum. It’s got 20 percent more horsepower, but the disk drive adds another 90GB of storage. Oh, and that’s an extra $400. You won’t be able to boost the power of the Macbook, but you can always add more storage.

The included device gained some stability in later MB Pro units, so by 2008 you had a better than even chance of having a SuperDrive remain operative within the one-year warranty. But hundreds of thousands of MacBook Pro SuperDrives went out the door with a Mean Time Between Failure  (the old MTBF ranking for professional storage) of well under 20,000 hours. A weak figure at best, and unacceptible for small business or enterprise use.

Replacing these units can be simple, or not too costly. But not both. By simple, I mean the $310 replacement drive from the Apple Store, plus an $85 replacement fee. “It’s pretty much $400,” the Apple Genius Bar tech told me tonight. (Then there’s the tax, but at least there’s no shipping.) That’s a total cost of 40 percent of the price of a new MacBook, and about one-third the cost of the lowest MacBook Pro. But this solution is easy, so long as you can do without your MacBook for a week or more. (This is where having the Apple Pro uplift on AppleCare gets you to the front of the line, I’m told.)Fixing this problem with a solution that’s less costly is well, not easy. But for $160, Other World Computing will sell you a replacement drive to slip inside the MacBook Pro, plus point you at a 20-minute Web-based movie of how to install it yourself. You remove 24 screws, plus jiggle one tricky clip, to expose the drive bay and replace the unit. Yeah, some of the screws are magnetized.

The upside to replacing your own drive for only $170 — aside from not losing the use of your laptop for a week — is that you also expose the hard drive bay, which lets you replace the MacBook Pro’s original 5400 RPM drive with a much faster 7200 RPM unit. This faster hard drive (only about $110 for a drive three times larger) is just about the only way to improve the performance of a certain vintage of MacBook Pro: the 2006 units which don’t accept more than 2GB of memory.

None of these internal replacement SuperDrives comes close to what you gain from an external DVD/CD Superdrive. The Sony DRX 840U is a dual-layer CD/DVD writer and reader, 20X speed. I use it with my MacBook Pro, whose original equipment SuperDrive died off after less than two years. The 840U costs about $95 at Amazon, and runs whisper quiet. Its only flaw so far is an inability to eject media using the MacBook Pro’s eject key.

But unless you’re a big fan of using your laptop on flights to watch movies, the need for an internal DVD drive is rare at best. Apple made a poor design choice with these Superdrives that accept disks slipped inside, rather than use a tray, like in most DVD players. All in the name of cost and weight, perhaps, but you pay the extra as an owner to replace this flaky hardware. By all means, don’t buy a used MacBook Pro without anticipating a SuperDrive replacement in your ownership future.