Western Digital My Book Essential 3TB

Full Review

This Western Digital My Book Essential 3TB (WD30EZRS) external hard drive uses internally a drive we have previously reviewed. That is, the Western Digital Caviar Green 3 TB (WD30EZRS), an internal 'green' drive. The 3TB storage serves as an attractive option for users who want to store a lot of data on external drives. Whether you are a desktop user who wants the flexibility of data on a portable drive, or a laptop user with enormous storage needs, WD claims this is the drive to pick.

Let's see whether its performance in our benchmark tests makes it a good choice for meeting your external storage needs.


Design
The My Book 3TB comes in a form factor measuring 16.5cm in height, 13.5 cm in depth and 4.8 cm in width. In terms of appearance, it's almost an exact replica of earlier iterations of the My Book Essential Series. The drive is rounded around the edges - aptly resembling a book - and has a glossy black plastic build that attracts its fair share of fingerprints and smudges. At the front of the drive, there is an LED power indicator, with the WD logo located at the lower section.  

The two rubber stands, located at the vertical base of the drive, keeps the drive slightly elevated above ground level allowing for a better air flow. Grate-like air-flow/heat-dissipation vents cover the vertical top, rear and bottom sections of the drive. At the rear of the drive, you will find the rectangular Power Button.



A SuperSpeed USB 3.0 port, a standard power port, and a Kensington port are located below the power button. The drive comes with a USB 3.0 cable, a power adapter and cable.


Specifications
Since this uses the very same Western Digital Caviar Green 3 TB internal drive, the My Book 3.0 TB drive comes with 64MB of cache, spins at 5400 RPM, uses 4 platters - each of 750 GB and provides 2974.5 GB of usable space.

Western Digital offers a three-year warranty for their product. More details can be found on this review's "Specifications" page or on Western Digital's product page for the drive.


Software
A good aspect of this Western Digital My Book drive is that it already comes formatted as a single NTFS 3TB partition (simple MBR mode). This is handy for compatibility, as you won't have to initialize the drive in the GPT mode; for the entire 3TB storage space to be recognised by your system.

The My Book Essential comes with software - WD SmartWare - for managing the drive and associated functions such as backups. The drive can be locked and unlocked once you have entered the password - this is optional and you can also opt not to have a password for locking/unlocking your drive.



However if you do decide on enabling the drive locking feature, it might at times get on your nerves. Whenever you do connect this drive to your system, for you to access the drive, you have to unlock the drive first. If you are in a situation where you have to repeatedly connect and disconnect this drive, the unlocking has to be repeated that may times.

When the drive was in operation, it was almost inaudible - as is the norm expected of most external drives. Under regular use, the hard disk was slightly warm to the touch.


Performance
We ran synthetic benchmarks and real world tests using the fastest PC components at hand, to remove most bottlenecks that hold back performance.

While running synthetic tests, we measured a read speed average of 92.3 MB/s, and write speed average of 90.05 MB/s. Read and write access times averaged 15.8 ms and 7.48 ms (milliseconds) respectively.

Real world read speeds were recorded at 89.53 MB/s for large files. Real world file write speeds stood at 85.58 MB/s for a single large file, but fell to 49.64 MB/s when writing multiple tiny files. The fall of speed seen while transferring the smaller files was expected, as we used tiny files for a fairly intensive test.

Bottom Line

The performance of this My Book 3.0 TB drive is appreciation worthy, being a 5400rpm HDD inside a USB 3.0 enclosure. The platter density does the rest and lands up giving it some of the best speeds seen on a spinning USB 3.0 drive.

Having a USB 3.0 port is an advantageous feature, but if your PC doesn't have a USB 3.0 port, you will be using this drive at far slower USB 2.0 speeds. In the instance that you lose the USB 3.0 cable, finding a replacement would be hard as these cables are not yet widely available in the market.

The current price is certainly suffering from the Thailand flood's impact, we fully expect the price to be more affordable in a few months. On the whole, this drive is a good buy for backing up your data and will be a worthwhile buy.

However if you plan on using some other connector other than USB 3.0 port, it would be advisable to opt for the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk, as it has a removable adapter, granting you the flexibility of switching between USB 2.0, USB 3.0, eSATA, and FireWire connectors.

On the other hand, if you are on the lookout for a USB 3.0 external drive that is more portable and doesn’t have an accompanying power plug, you can opt for the WD My Passport Essential SE 1TB USB 3.0 drive.