Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB and My Book Essential 3TB Drives Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 19, 2010 1:43 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- HDDs
- Western Digital
- 3TB
Performance vs. Capacity
Hard drives are made up of one or more circular platters. Platters are written from the outside inward in order to maximize performance (you cover more data in a single rotation of an outer track vs an inner track). As was the case in our Seagate 3TB review I had to turn to HD Tune as HD Tach doesn't support 64-bit LBAs:
Maximum read performance is 130MB/s while maximum write speed is 121.7MB/s. The minimum speed you'll get out of the drive is ~55MB/s at its inner most tracks.
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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