As difficult as it is to get excited about a hard drive, the Western Digital My Book Home Edition has performed well enough for me over the past 5 months, that I have accumulated 3 of them: 2 of the 500GB flavors and a 1TB monster-in-disguise. Both models have identical physical dimensions and appearance and thus look rather nice flashing ominously as the three wise men standing watch over my Mac Mini. I use one of the 500GB models as a bootable, external hard drive that has been used to boot an aluminum iMac(2008), MacBook Pro(2006), and Mac Mini(2009). The other 500GB drive is used as storage for an iTunes Music Folder. It currently contains approximately 110GB of music files for iTunes to work with. Finally, the 1TB drive is used as a multipurpose, lab experiment drive. I have beaten it up pretty bad repartitioning, reformatting, and in general treating it like a late 90's floppy disk dug out of the trash. They have all held up brilliantly.

Whether you are a seasoned OS X veteran or brand new to the operating system, Mac OS X Support Essentials is a wonderful book to use as both a learning and reference tool to help you learn more about the capabilities and inner workings of Mac OS X.

Having read this book cover-to-cover twice now, the first time as a guide through the new features of Leopard, the second as a study guide in preparation for the Apple Certified Support Professional exam, I can say that this book has been extremely valuable in my explorations of Mac OS X. What follows below explains how this book can help a user of any ability level learn more about the Leopard (OS X 10.5) operating system. I have focused on both the novice and professional levels.