Western Digital pays a lot of attention to its Mac products, and the MyBook Studio Edition II is no exception. While companies such as LaCie and Iomega do provide drives that are preformatted in the Mac’s HFS+ format, as well as backup software for the Mac, Western Digital goes one step further by including a special program called Drive Manager that makes it easy to monitor and configure the RAID drive.

When you connect the drive to your Mac, the Drive Manager program launches automatically and puts an icon in the main menu bar at the top of the screen. Click on this icon and you see a menu that displays information such as the amount of space used on the drive, as well as diagnostic information on the health of the drive and the temperature of the drive mechanism. You can also use the Drive Manager to quickly switch to a different RAID mode, without even having to switch the drive off or fiddle with switches on the back of the drive. The Drive Manager program can also be used to reformat the drive to the FAT32 format so that it can be used by both Macs and PCs.

The MyBook Studio Edition II holds two separate 500GB hard disks (1TB total). It’s competitively priced at just under £200 for this model, and there’s also a 2TB model available for about £260.

The drives can be replaced if anything goes wrong – but only with Western Digital’s own Caviar range of drives, which the company claims are 30 per cent more energy efficient than traditional drive mechanisms. The label on the box indicates that the drive has USB 2.0, FireWire 400 and 800, and eSATA interfaces. In actual fact it doesn’t have a FireWire 400 interface, but Western Digital does provide an adaptor cable so that you can connect its FireWire 800 interface to the FireWire 400 interface on a Mac if required. It also has a second FireWire 800 interface that can be used to connect other FireWire devices if you need to.

Performance with the USB and FireWire interfaces is similar to that of rival drives with the same interfaces. However, it’s the competitive price and Mac-friendly Drive Manager software that stand out and make this a RAID drive that will appeal to both small and large businesses, as well as educational users.