Western Digital My Book Home Edition
External Hard Drive
Storage Size: 320 GB
Transfer medium: USB 2.0, FireWire 400, eSATA
What it holds: (these are approximate numbers taken from My Book manf. Page.)
Up to 91,400 digital photos
Up to 80,000 songs (MP3)
Up to 8,000 songs (uncompressed CD quality)
Up to 24 hours of Digital Video (DV)
Up to 140 hours of DVD quality video
Up to 38 hours of HD video
Transfer Speeds:
eSATA Serial Bus Transfer Rate (eSATA) 3 Gb/s (Max)
FireWire 400 (1394a) 400 Mbits/s (Max)
USB 2.0 480 Mbits/s (Max)
NOTE: This review of the My Book 320GB drive may differ from most consumer reviews as I only use this drive as a backup disk, not as a mass storage device.
----- I wish I was a (Hard) Disc ‘o’ Superstar -----
For the last year or so I've been lusting after an external hard drive, both for the extra storage and the software backup capabilities. It wasn't until I upgraded to Apple's OS 10.5 Leopard that I decided to take the plunge and jump into a new hard drive. The decision to purchase was mostly due to the excellent
Time Machine backup program included with Leopard which makes a mirror image of your system daily, if you have any problems you simply go back to the day you need to restore from… however you must have an external hard drive.
I chose the 320GB My Book solely due to its Firewire 400 compatibility and higher transfer speeds, although the salesman tried to push me into the USB drives based on the fact I didn’t need a separate power connection. Since my USB ports are all full and I still have an open Firewire 400 port, I decided to stick with this drive and plugging it into a surge-protected power strip isn’t a big deal to me. The 320GB Firewire My Book was also one of the few external hard drives in stock at Best Buy which displayed full compatibility with Apple’s operating system.
I first tried plugging in the My Book to my desktop PC USB 2.0 port on Windows XP with SP2 installed. It recognized the drive right away and attempted to install the correct drivers from the My Book drive since all drivers are preloaded onto the drive itself. Since I was planning on using the drive for my
Apple iMac I declined to finish the driver install and instead moved the drive to my 24” iMac. Since I wasn’t going to be using the drive as an open mass storage drive, I opened Time Machine and proceeded to format/setup the drive as a backup disk. The estimated time for backup completion was about 1 hour for a complete backup of my system, however the actual time was just over 30 minutes. I’m quite impressed with the speed of transfer and acquisition on the My Book drive and it’s been working flawlessly with my daily backup program.
Since backing up important data is one of the main reasons to buy an external drive, there are several backup-enhancing technologies on this unit. The My Book drive turns itself on and off with your computer, although Smart Shutdown will not allow it to turn itself off until your data has finished writing. It also goes into standby mode after 10 minutes of inactivity and wakes up as soon as you access it.
Size wise this is a small hard drive, although it’s about average for the current crop of external drives. Western Digital tries to make it seem like a book as the packaging shows the unit unobtrusively tucked into a bookshelf… not that most users are likely to do that, but still I guess it’s a cool marketing gimmick.
----- Final Thoughts -----
This is one of the simplest pieces of hardware I’ve ever set up, all you get in the box is the hard drive unit, power cable, and both USB 2.0 and Firewire cables. There’s 3 holes in the back for the cables, all you need to do is choose your transfer cable and plug in the power pack… away you go on a beautiful journey. There are no driver CDs to load as the unit has drivers preloaded on the hard disk.
The only annoying feature on the My Book drive is a vertical LED light on front of the unit. It’s supposed to be a capacity meter which fills up as the hard drive nears maximum storage. I can’t make any sense of what the light does, sometimes it’s steady, other times it pulses and glows, sometimes it flashes, sometimes it does an alternating strobe effect that goes on for a minute or so. I’d rather just have small LEDs for power on and disk access… simple and easy to understand. I’m sure the gauge indicates sleep mode and other stuff, but without any use manual explaining to the user what’s going on it’s pointless.
I’m quite satisfied with my choice of drive and hopefully it will continue to work great for years to come. If I were to buy another drive I would definitely look at another My Book unit, although since only my MacBook laptop has a Firewire port I’d probably get a USB model next time to use on my PC desktop. Other sizes available in the My Book Home series are 500, 750, and 1,000 GB. If your desktop PC is equipped with an
eSATA interface you'll be able to achieve speeds near those of internal hard disks. Not many systems come with this installed although you could upgrade if your system has the expansion room.
A quick note to shoppers, there’s a difference in price between USB 2.0 models as some of them have an external power source (cheaper) while others need to be plugged into a powered USB port and don’t need their own power cord (more expensive).
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