We received the Western Digital My Book 3.0 1TB external drive at PC World Labs a few days ago. This is the first USB 3.0 (SuperSpeed) external hard disk drive to go on sale in India. We have a few more tests to finish, but wanted to let you know that the speeds are looking very promising. Watch out for our review of this product which will be up very soon.

The USB 3.0 interface theoretically offers a maximum speed of 4.8 Gigabits/second (Gbps) but after allowing for overheads you can expect a bit lower in practice. Also take into account the limitations of the current standard for storage drives (SATA 2.0) which itself offers a maximum of 3Gbps, and you’d have your expectations set at the right level. The best part has got to be the fact that the USB 3.0 connector is backward-compatible with the USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 standards. Does USB 3.0 deliver on its promise?

As we saw, in a broad sense and across the board, USB 3.0 is a definite improvement. At an average speed that topped out at 100 MegaBytes/second, the My Book 3.0 was clearly thrice as fast compared to the average USB 2.0 drive with a speed of approximately 30 MegaBytes/second. Thus, at least one huge bottleneck has been removed – that of the USB 2.0 limitation which was starting to become a mill-stone around the neck for today’s massive drives and data sizes.

Western Digital is shipping the drive on its own, and also in a kit with a PCI-Express x1 add-in card (NEC chip for USB 3.0 support) which was the one we got. This add-in card will be useful for those with older desktops that use motherboards without built-in support for USB 3.0 – in fact only the most current higher-end PC motherboards and premium laptops support USB3.0 SuperSpeed. The price differential for the add-in card might well be worth it, for most people currently. For more details of how this drive performed in synthetic and real-world benchmarks, and whether you can finally use an external drive for data-speed intensive purposes, read our upcoming review.