External Hard Drive Offers Lighting Fast Speeds
There just doesn’t seem to be enough storage for all of our needs these days. At the rate we’re downloading purchases from audio and video sites, the rate we’re producing content with access to video creators, web cams, and more, storage seems to be a very valued commodity these days. Most of us rely on what our systems come with, then perhaps turning to cloud storage for a few things, but ultimately a lot of us have external hard drives to store our information off the main system. As much as I love the Drobo, that’s just a huge expense that I’m not sure I want to drop right now. If you’re looking for something simple with lightning fast connectivity, then look no further than the WD My Book 3.0.
The My Book 3.0 ($200) offers connections using USB 3.0 which is ten times faster then it’s 2.0 counterpart. The speed is amazingly fast, pushing almost 5GB of data per second. The device also comes with a USB 3.0 card for you to install in your system, but it also work with 2.0 connections for other computers you might be connecting it to. The transfer rates alone make this device a must have for those of us storing large amounts of data and who access it regularly.
The device itself is small, takes up minimal space, and actually looks like a book standing upright in a shelf. The sleek design gives it a minimalist look of elegance. It’s formatted for Windows machines only, connecting to Windows XP, Vistsa, and the new Windows 7.
1 Comment
The previous series of MyBook hard drives have been known to be tediously slow (25 MB/s max for the latest series, while previous ones sometimes didn’t do more than 5 MB/s).
The reason for that was a slow CPU. There was no reason to put gigabit ethernet in their world series, as 100 mbit would have been sufficient; it was just a plain dirty marketing trick from WD to get customers to buy their drives.
Having said that, there is no reason at all to assume that this new drive will be much faster. As a tech blog, you should do a better job checking your resources instead of just copying what the manufacturer says.
The reason is this: the maximum transfer speed of the *interface* (USB3) is 4.8 gb/s (gigabit, not gigabyte (GB) as in your article – which already is an 8x difference).
That the interface can do almost 5 gb/s, which indeed is 10x faster than the USB2 interface, doesn’t say the actual data that gets transferred per second is also 10x more.
The harddrive in the WD box and the processor in it simply can’t do that – you need a state of the art SSD to achieve these speeds.
So please, let’s await some tests instead of just copying the manufacturers deceptive claims!