Western Digital My Book Pro Edition II: £399 terabyte drive

Multimedia file hoarders rejoice: Western Digital has just announced a new terabyte storage device for under £400. The gorgeous Western Digital My Book Professional Edition II not only makes most of its rivals look like the brittle shavings of a tramp's verruca-encrusted feet, it also offers a shed-load more storage.

The device, which consists of two separate 500GB hard drives, provides enough space to store 125 hours of high-definition movie footage, nearly 1,500 DivX movies or 256,000 MP3 files -- enough continuous music to ensure you never hear the same song twice in nearly two years. That's a helluva lot.

The My Book Pro Edition II is surprisingly good value for money at 2.5GB per quid and is FireWire 800-compatible, which should give you a maximum transfer rate of 800Mbps -- considerably more than USB 2's 480Mbps.

Unfortunately, it's not a network-attached storage (NAS) device so you won't be able to access data while your PC is switched off. Still, we like the fact that it comes in a choice of configurations: RAID 0 (striping) for high-speed disk access and RAID 1 (mirroring), which automatically backs up all your data to both hard drives.

We like it. You should too. Check out Western Digital's Web site for more info. -RR

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