- Choice of interfaces
- Quiet
- Value for money
- Lacking performance
With hard drive prices crashing to crazy levels, now is as good a time as any to invest in additional storage. Western Digital has updated its external range, and it includes this new My Book Home Edition 500GB drive.
In keeping with the theme, the drive is shaped like a book, with the familiar slotted cooling vents representing the "pages". The round power light of old has been replaced with a dim blue bar, which works in the same way by roughly displaying the amount of storage space available. This is divided into four different segments and requires the installation of a dedicated driver.
The My Book offers inputs akimbo with two FireWire ports (one 400 and one 800), an eSATA and a USB port. Though there is a FireWire and a USB cable in the package unfortunately there's no eSATA cable included. On a side note: finding an eSATA cable could also prove difficult -- we had to visit four different local computer stores before we found one.
The drive ships with a tonne of software which includes Memeo AutoSync, various Google apps, a "copy application software" tool, and the WD Anywhere backup program.
The drive didn't perform as well as the WD's own My Book Premium ES Edition which you can find cheaper online. Using the standard USB cable we were able to get a 21.9 MB/s read speed, which is slower than the Premium's 28.4 MB/s. Using eSATA we were able to get a more respectable 48.6 MB/s speed, but this was still slower than the Premium's 66.4 MB/s score.
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