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.
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BoloMKXXVIII - Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - link
NEVER trust your backup data to the cloud unless you are cool with ALL the government agencies snooping through your stuff and potentially having hackers in your stuff. Time after time we learn about terrible security practices of online companies that are supposed to know better. Have multiple backups stored in different locations (home and work, home and family members house, etc.).Michael Bay - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
My old 500Gb WD Green died on me some time ago. Other than that, I have no complaints.I have replaced it with Seagate ST2000DM001 which has, shall we say, questionable reputation, of which I only learned postfactum. It has worked well for three years now, but boy is it LOUD.
On DAS side, my old 1Tb WD has somehow lost all of the data, probably had to do with FAT failure. And one of my new 8Tb Seagate`s has a concerning habit of going unresponsive sometimes after I copy something big to it. Somehow it always coincides with torrent client running(it doesn`t have to download anything, just running is enough).
Point is, it`s a goddamn lottery.
jackhorizon8 - Sunday, August 30, 2020 - link
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The Chassis looks like an Xbox One.Samus - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
I actually like the chassis. What bothers me is, like Seagate chassis, they are a bitch to open and shuck. As Ganesh said, the 2.5" isn't even shuckable because it has a USB bridge on the PCB (there is no SATA connection) and the 3.5" drive has a nerfed firmware, not uncommon on Seagate drives.Years ago I received legal threats from Seagate for posting firmware dump \ flash instructions in the AT forums to "hack" shucked external drives to operate on SATA with the full AHCI command set. I'm sure this is still business as usual for these companies, but less relevant as they make custom PCB's for their external drives that remove the physical SATA interface all together.
Backblaze operates about 12% of their data center on shucked drives according to their purchase reports from 2011-2012, due to the global disk shortage during that period due to floods in Thailand...they literally drove store to store buying every retail drive they could, including external drives, in order to meet their expansion demands during that period.
Unfortunately the consequences of this led storage companies to do everything they reasonable could to prevent shucking; they had previously ignored shucking when it was a hobbyist niche, but the sheer scale of backblaze doing this (we are talking thousands of drives in a matter of months during a global crisis) this act alone was enough to hit their bottom line as external drives were sold at a lower price.
Personally, I don't feel Backblaze did anything wrong, they found a creative way to survive.
Xajel - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
The thing I hate about WD is that they started the bad habit of integrating the USB<->SATA bridge into the HDD board it self without any physical way to bypass it ( direct SATA connection )... they said that to be able to make the drives smaller and smaller, but the other reason they don't want to give is to cut costs and when any drive fail ( duo to USB connector or bridge failure ) then 90% of customers will just go and buy another one !!damianrobertjones - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
" then 90% of customers will just go and buy another one !!"Hopefully from another company.
Michael Bay - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
There is only one another company though.valinor89 - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
Seems that consumer ping pong is a game played between companies nowadays instead of trying for retention....Notmyusualid - Monday, October 17, 2016 - link
I'm very happy you made note of the fact that you cannot use this WD 2.5" disk in a normal manner outside of its USB enclosure - as I just purchased the 3TB version just for that purpose, and was CRUSHED to find the USB-SATA controller as part of the drives' mainboard also.And that wasn't a cheap mistake to make.