Western Digital’s drives tend to stand out a bit more than some of the others that arrive in the PC Authority Labs. Both the desktop and portable models have curved edges and tactile surfaces, as opposed to the slightly staid boxes that tend to populate the world of external hard disks.
As well as being one of the best-looking products this month, the My Book has one of the best feature sets. This is one of only three desktop drives we tested to offer USB, FireWire and the super-fast eSATA.
The My Book performed well – although it wasn’t the top drive in any of our tests. USB performance was competent, with neither single files nor collections of files proving problematic. FireWire returned slightly slower figures, but it still beat two of the other FireWire-equipped drives in the Labs.
Benchmark performance over the eSATA connection was, as expected, far quicker than USB. No tests exhibited poor results, although the Seagate and Buffalo offerings were faster – albeit by fractions of a second.
The Western Digital also includes an enormously generous warranty. While most other drives this month offer a year or two of support, the My Book comes with a superb five-year warranty.
Most surprising of all, however is the price. Costing 31c per gigabyte, it’s one of the best value desktop drives on test this month – especially when you consider the extra connectivity options not available on the cheaper drives.
Across the board the Western Digital is a good investment: plenty of interfaces and a superb warranty make for a versatile and dependable package. A worthy Labs Winner indeed.
This article appeared in the January, 2009 issue of PC Authority.