Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB and My Book Essential 3TB Drives Reviewed

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• Photo-Nerd - Sunday, October 24, 2010 - link

  It was slooooooooowwwwww, but on top of that, disk utility was reporting a smart failure.
  
  This drive equals the suck.
  
  Boooooo

• piroroadkill - Monday, October 25, 2010 - link

  You mean that now and then you get failures of <any product name here>?
  
  Colour me shocked.

• pesos - Saturday, December 18, 2010 - link

  Hi Anand, I bought a mybook 3tb usb3 drive with the intention of using it to store Hyper-V VHD virtual disk files.
  
  Hyper-V is reporting that it cannot use drives with 4k sector sizes (way to go, microsoft). I have heard that the built-in WSB (same engine used for win7 backups) also has this limitation.
  
  Do you know if there is any way to get 512b emulation on the MyBook drives, or do I need to return this drive and go with a different solution?
  
  Thanks,
  Wes

• Azaloom - Monday, January 10, 2011 - link

  That bundled PCIe-card really looks like a 4-port card. Maybe that's why the HighPoint’s drivers won't work - they have altered the card a little bit and removed port 3 and 4 plugs as excessive? But the solder bases looks to be there on the circuit board. I wonder if you could make it into a 4 four port SATA card just by soldering the missing SATA data-ports to their bases on the board. I mean I already thought about bying this HDD because I have all the SATA ports in use on my MB, and this would give the possibility of adding not one but two more HDD's - who knows, it that's four with a little tweaking. One PCIe lane should be more than enough to drive 4 mainstream HDD's for the average user.

• coyote2 - Tuesday, February 8, 2011 - link

  If a 3TB drive is only formatted to < 2.19TB, would that remove all complications of booting from it?
  
  (Odd question, I know. But I'm buying a new system, for which I already own a boot drive I want to reinstall the OS onto; but the system builder requires that I buy the new system with the OS [Windows 7 Pro 64-bit] pre-installed; I'm just wondering if they only format a 3TB hdd to < 2.19TB, will booting from it will be issue-free?)

• eazmichael - Tuesday, March 1, 2011 - link

  Is WD using the same HD model in the 3TB My book as the internal package? The stand-alone drive costs around $215 or more while the 3 TB My book is now available for less than $180. i was thinking about putting two of the drives in a Synology DS211+ enclosure (Raid 1) - it looks a bit like it is cheaper to buy two My Books and rip the drives out.

• burbello - Monday, June 30, 2014 - link

  Does anybody know if it is possible to replace the hard disk of Western Digital 640GB My Book for a new one with 3TB ? When replacing only the disk, should I perform any particular step? Thank you.

• burbello - Monday, June 30, 2014 - link

  I have an Western Digital 640GB My Book, I would like to replace the hard disk to another WD 3TB, but I am not sure if it will work, does anybody know if this is compatible or even if I have to perform any additional step? Thank you