Western Digital My Book 8TB and My Passport 4TB External HDDs Review
by Ganesh T S on October 16, 2016 8:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- USB 3.0
- Western Digital
- DAS
Miscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks
There are a multitude of options targeting the same market segment when it comes to DAS units with single hard drives. As we saw in the performance evaluation section, there is really not much to differentiate between the various options in the same product class when it comes to the usage patterns of the average consumer. Most consumers would do well to choose the cheapest model at the time of purchase. In order to escape this rut of being a commodity, manufacturers have started to offer value additions to their DAS products. For example, Seagate bundles a backup application, cloud storage (200GB of OneDrive for two years) and the Lyve photo management app along with their DAS units. Western Digital also adopts a similar value-add strategy. We have the WD Backup application that can help keep a continuous backup of certain folders in a PC on the DAS unit.
Western Digital also includes a utility program and a security configuration program. The utility helps the users to run disk checks, configure the drive spin down time interval, turn off the LED (for the My Passport model) and secure erase the drive. The security program allows users to set a password for accessing the drive, with the option to unlock the drive for the current Windows account and do related management tasks.
Note that this password activates the AES-256 hardware encryption block on the drive (the encryption is in the drive, rather than the USB bridge chip) for both models. We ran CrystalDiskMark with an encrypted drive and found that there was no performance loss due to the activation of the security features.
Coming to the business end of the review, the new My Book 8TB model retains the price of the earlier model - $250. This is much cheaper than the $349 of the Seagate Innov8, but priced around $35 more than the Seagate Backup Plus 8TB that comes with 200GB of cloud storage for two years. However, to WD's advantage, it does sport a helium drive with consistent performance compared to the Archive HDD used in the offerings from Seagate. The My Passport 4TB pricing follows a similar trend. At $139, it is around $20 more than the Seagate Backup Plus Portable 4TB drive which comes with 200GB of cloud storage for two years. This drive is PMR-based and (Update - 10/21/2016: The ST4000LM016 uses platters that operate partly in PMR mode and partly in SMR, along with multi-tier caching (MTC) which includes DRAM and flash - The efficiency of MTC ensures that an empty drive maintains as much consistency as a PMR drive even under heavy traffic.) offers performance similar to the My Passport 4TB. That said, both the My Book 8TB and the My Passport 4TB offers hardware encryption, which might be worth the premium over 200GB of cloud storage for two years offered by the Seagate models for some users. Other than these aspects, there is little to differentiate the products from Seagate and Western Digital in this space. Consumers can choose either vendor / model depending on their requirements.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
35 Comments
View All Comments
fazalmajid - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
WD and Seagate both suck. The drives to get are HGST (formerly Hitachi, formerly-er IBM), despite the fact HGST is now owned by WDC.piroroadkill - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
Correct.Breit - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
I've got a total of 6 of these previous-gen WD MyBook 8TB model here and guess what: I took them all apart to see what's actually in them. In two of them there is actually a HGST Helium drive installed with a HGST sticker on it. The other 4 have an identical drive (same exteriour, same electronics, same name) but an updated sticker, which says WD instead of HGST. They look nearly identical to the HGST He8 drives, despite they are only 5400rpm. So I guess they are infact HGST drives, which is a good thing.Maybe buying them sooner rather then later might be a good idea, assuming WD will change the design in the future to bring costs down (the external WD 8TB drives cost ~$250, while the bare drives without external enclosures in the form of the WD Red costs around $300-350 for whatever reason).
Samus - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
I see mostly Seagate 3.5" failures especially in the 7200.10-7200.12 series, and tons of WD Black and WD Blue 2.5" failures. I've only seen ONE WD Blue 3.5" desktop drive fail.The other point to note is Seagate drives fail catastrophically. My friend Mitchell works for a data recovery service in Chicago, and backs this up whenever we talk. Seagate drives they receive have a very low recovery rate compared to all other brands because many failures result in the platters being physically scratched (radial surface scratch) which nobody can recover because the media is ruined and there just isn't enough error correction to recover from surface defects on this scale.
He is particularly fond of...you guessed it, Hitachi-designed drives. Most failures are controller related and are turned around 100% satisfactory using a donor drive.
Hitachi Coolspins are as good as people rave about. It's ridiculous to trust your data on anything else if you can cope with the 4TB max capacity before the design changed to the joint Hitachi-WD developed Deskstar/Ultrastar models that come in larger capacities. The original Hitachi developed designed ended at 4TB, but are still sold at retailers because they are actually still in production.
Wardrop - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
Interesting. Thanks for sharing.fanofanand - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
Count me in the camp that had a 7200.10 fail on me after 18 months of use. I won't buy a spinning platter again.BrokenCrayons - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
Hard drives are useful as infrequently used backup drives since modern SSDs have problems with long-term data retention. For instance, if you stick your backup drive at a relative's house like I do (~45 mins drive from my home) and forget about it, a modern SSD may not be the best solution based on what I've been reading about TLC.Michael Bay - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
But are they quiet? Price is indeed good.MrSpadge - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
Anecdotal experience is worth nothing when we're talking about statistics with single-digit yearly failure rates (as most normal HDDs have, server grade units score better). And you should not TRUST any single storage device, no matter how reliable you think it is.Samus - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
This. Backup backup backup. Cloud backup services are $50 a year for unlimited storage and protect you from every form of data failure (fire flood theft surge malware infections accidental deletion mechanical failure etc)