Western Digital My Book Essential 3TB

Full Review

This Western Digital My Book Essential 3TB (WD30EZRS) external hard drive uses internally a drive we have previously reviewed. That is, the Western Digital Caviar Green 3 TB (WD30EZRS), an internal 'green' drive. The 3TB storage serves as an attractive option for users who want to store a lot of data on external drives. Whether you are a desktop user who wants the flexibility of data on a portable drive, or a laptop user with enormous storage needs, WD claims this is the drive to pick.

Design

The My Book 3TB comes in a form factor measuring 16.5cm in height, 13.5 cm in depth and 4.8 cm in width. In terms of appearance, it's almost an exact replica of earlier iterations of the My Book Essential Series. The drive is rounded around the edges - aptly resembling a book - and has a glossy black plastic build that attracts its fair share of fingerprints and smudges. At the front of the drive, there is an LED power indicator, with the WD logo located at the lower section.  

The two rubber stands, located at the vertical base of the drive, keeps the drive slightly elevated above ground level allowing for a better air flow. Grate-like air-flow/heat-dissipation vents cover the vertical top, rear and bottom sections of the drive. At the rear of the drive, you will find the rectangular Power Button.

A SuperSpeed USB 3.0 port, a standard power port, and a Kensington port are located below the power button. The drive comes with a USB 3.0 cable, a power adapter and cable.

Specifications

Since this uses the very same Western Digital Caviar Green 3 TB internal drive, the My Book 3.0 TB drive comes with 64MB of cache, spins at 5400 RPM, uses 4 platters - each of 750 GB and provides 2974.5 GB of usable space. 

Western Digital offers a three-year warranty for their product. More details can be found on this review's "Specifications" page or on Western Digital's product page for the drive.

Performance

We ran synthetic benchmarks and real world tests using the fastest PC components at hand, to remove most bottlenecks that hold back performance. 

While running synthetic tests, we measured a read speed average of 92.3 MB/s, and write speed average of 90.05 MB/s. Read and write access times averaged 15.8 ms and 7.48 ms (milliseconds) respectively.

Real world read speeds were recorded at 89.53 MB/s for large files. Real world file write speeds stood at 85.58 MB/s for a single large file, but fell to 49.64 MB/s when writing multiple tiny files. The fall of speed seen while transferring the smaller files was expected, as we used tiny files for a fairly intensive test.

Bottom Line

The performance of this My Book 3.0 TB drive is appreciation worthy, being a 5400rpm HDD inside a USB 3.0 enclosure. The platter density does the rest and lands up giving it some of the best speeds seen on a spinning USB 3.0 drive.

Having a USB 3.0 port is an advantageous feature, but if your PC doesn't have a USB 3.0 port, you will be using this drive at far slower USB 2.0 speeds. In the instance that you lose the USB 3.0 cable, finding a replacement would be hard as these cables are not yet widely available in the market.