WESTERN DIGITAL HAS joined the 3TB drive club with their new My Book Essential external HD. If you are thinking that this is simply a 3TB drive slapped into an existing USB2/3 case, you would be right.
Normally we would list the specs of the drive here, but Western Digital seems to have gone to great lengths to hide what the drive inside actually is. With an immense amount of digging, you can find out that it is a Greenpower drive, but things like platters, speed, and transfer rates are glaring in their absence. I wonder what they are trying to hide?
The press release says that the drive can transfer data at up to 150MBps when using USB3, so the added speed over USB2 is actually necessary, and there is quite a bit of headroom left. If you are doing large sequential transfers, this could be a nice box.
Other than that, it comes with WD’s backup and encryption software, both of which are only useful if you are running Windows. Should you have enough brains not to run The Broken OS, you might want to skip the WD Essential and wait for the model down, or better yet buy the bare drive and a Thermaltake BlackX, you would be better off.S|A
Charlie Demerjian
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