Dimensions: 58 x 173 x 147 mm ( W x H x L )
 

Western
Digital
My Book

Home Edition
Hard Drive

  Over the years Western Digital has proved itself a reliable and innovative hard drive manufacturer.

Their latest 'My Book Home Edition' Hard Drive is yet another example of Western Digital's continuing ability to produce modern, high quality products.

The Western Digital Home Edition hard drive is a small but solidly constructed device; smooth curves grace it's front and rear, giving the device a simple yet appealing overall look.

When you power up the device the first thing you notice is that lack of any significant drive noise; the device is very quite in operation. The next thing you notice is the modest design of the drive front with nothing more than a thin strip of white activity LEDs.

The rear of the drive also remains uncluttered even though there are a number of interfaces present. There is an on/off button, power input socket, external serial ATA port (eSATA), two Firewire ports and a USB port.

The drive does not have a built-in power supply, thus it comes supplied with a small, external power brick instead. This is expected for a small device, as the added bulk of a built-in PSU would have increased the overall size of the device significantly.

Although there is not a lot of software supplied with the device, what is provided is of good quality, particularly the 'WD Anywhere Backup' application that allows you to quickly and easily create a backup of your files. In fact the software will even backup your entire hard drive should you so wish!

Now we move to performance, the table below shows a group of tests carried out to illustrate how the drive performs when 'writing' different sizes and quantities of files:

The principal thing you should take from these results is that the drive handles all types and sizes of files with ease. Transferring large and/or many small files in double quick time!

NOTE: All of the drive tests above have been performed using the drive's eSATA interface. Any data transfers using either the Firewire ports or indeed the USB 2 port will produce significantly slower results.

If we compare these results with those attained with Western Digital's Network Hard Drive (see separate review) we can very quickly see the benefits that the eSATA interface has on transfer speeds, With 10GB taking just a little over 2 minutes to write, compared to the NAS drives 11GB of data taking around 25 minutes. Even if we adjust things for the slightly larger transfer size, the eSATA interface is more than 10 times faster!

Prices are currently around £90 (1TB version), which is around £15 more that a standard USB 2.0 version. But the extra cost is worth it, the transfer rates of this device are significantly faster, thus you will spend less time actually backing up and, more importantly, you will be far more inclined to backup more often because it's not going to take as long to complete!

Advantages:

Excellent transfer rates
Small physical dimensions
Large storage capacity
Quiet in operation
Great ergonomics & build-quality
Good value for money
 

Disadvantages:

Nothing to speak of !
 

Conclusion: The Western Digital 'My Book Home Edition' drive is the fastest external hard drive I have come across (based on eSATA transfer rates). It's software is good and transfer rates excellent. If you have an external serial ATA port on the back of your computer, then this is the storage device for you...High recommended!

The Glitch Five Star Award

Overall Score

95%

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