Western Digital 1TB My Book HE - Reviewed, Dissected and Destroyed.

Western Digital 1TB My Book HE - Reviewed, Dissected and Destroyed.

The drive & Reason for purchasing.
I have been looking for a backup drive for sometime and while USB & 500GB would have been okay I was looking for something more. I picked up the Western Digital My Book 1 Terabyte Home Edition equipped with dual FireWire 400, a single USB 2.0 and a blazing fast eSATA port.

The drive comes with a power adapter, 1 USB cable and a 6 pin to 6 pin FireWire cable but lacks an eSATA causing me to spend an extra 20 bucks. The drive boasts a 30% power savings for reasons we will discuss in a moment. However western digital enclosures sometimes have trouble and are failure prone though one will find out most external enclosures are failure prone.



Benchmarking
I used the USB 2.0 cable supplied but the 6 to 6 FireWire cable was not usable with the laptop. I substituted a 6 to 4 pin with gold plated connectors that I use for a video camera. The eSATA is a Dynex brand cable and was the only thing available for this test thought it proved to function well enough.

TEST 1 - HD Tune run on the drive twice on each the stock fat 32 and then again with an NTFS format. To please the FireWire fan boys the best result for FireWire was displayed and the worst for USB and eSATA is shown.
USB FireWire eSATA

TEST 2 - Crystal Disk Mark 64 Bit with the drive formatted NTFS one run each interface.
USB FireWire eSATA

TEST 3 - A 4.3GB ISO was copied from the internal Seagate ST9320421AS 320GB 7200 RPM hard drive which benches about the same as the WD does via eSATA. Reboots where performed to minimize any read cache and the machine was allowed to settle for proper results. Due to the horrible FireWire time i redid the test without a reboot gaining a few seconds in speed.

3:19.60 USB
3:47.71 FireWire
1:03.30 eSATA

Performance Conclusion
Keep in mind that both the enclosure controller and the laptop controller can have an effect on the performance, eSATA is the clear winner here with the minimum not even close to USB and FireWires maximum.

I was never big on the need for FireWire, people always saying how its blazing fast compared to USB 2.0. I feel this drive is not an adequate test of the two bus's but the drive is obviously able to deliver. In the field of Western Digital external hard drives, FireWire fanboys mind as well keep their mouths shut and save 30-40 bucks by buying the usb essentials edition. For those who can benefit from the performance of the eSATA connector the price is worth it.

Conclusion
The lack of the eSATA cable for those paying retail price for this is disappointing as it comes with two other cables that I will never use, though I think including a USB cable is the best bet and all i expected it to come with. The drive goes along with the usual price scheme that WD has and as usual the single drive or the external can be found at lower then retail.

The LED lights are a nice but usual touch and the power button once removed from some models is now on the back, not so convenient. The LED's can display capacity if using USB or FireWire but not with eSATA due to it being a pure data interface, disappointing but understandable.

The included backup and sync software are 30 day trials which is a disappointment as the more expensive models used to include software for free. I actually figured this would happen when they introduced the Home Edition....

Disection and Photos


Those of you wondering how to get yours apart should stop unless the enclosure is already dead. You will soon find out why. The enclosure isnt hard to get apart if you know how. Starting with the side where the ports are you need to pry the case open. At this point the cover technically slides off..... easier said then done. Its actually easier to also pry the sides and then yank it apart but that leaves more tool marks then desired if your trying to keep the warranty possibly intact.

Once apart the drive is held in by 4 rubber grommets. The end of the drive not attached to the controller needs to pop out first and is very easy, once free pull the other side and the entire assembly will come out. By now the little clear peice for the led's has fallen off. You can separate the controller via 2 screws and sliding the cover/controller off. Be very careful with that part. The drive is free to be unscrewed now.

Upon dis-assembly we finally see what I expected. This contains WD's Caviar Green drive which can run at both 7200 and 5400 rpm to save energy. Looking at it you can tell there is a spot where a fan might go, it has a grill with 4 holes. The board has a jumper or connector that could possible be a power source for the fan. You will notice the lock hole is supported by a metal plate on the back. The shape and construction of the drive may still allow someone after the data and not the drive to yank it really hard and break the case.


Killing it!
In the learning process i managed to damage the controller. I do not believe taking the case apart did this. When trying to determine how the drive came out of it I unscrewed the controller cover and tried to slide it over. Either i shorted a capacitor or damaged the board in some other way. I played with it made sure the capacitors where connected properly and not bent abnormally. I got it to come up as an unrecognized device one time but that was about it.

I am now left with the decision of dealing with the 40 dollar loss of the enclosure and using the drive or hoping the minor tooling will pass for an exchange in a few days. Personally just having kicked the habit and not being able to get back to the store i bought it from, I think I will cut my losses and take the money I save each week and buy one of them thermal take docks that u can just pop drives in and out of for about 40 bucks. It comes in handy but i might still be able to return the drive....decisions decisions.

 

Great comparative benchmarks. Interesting to see that the interface clearly limits the transfer speeds with USB 2.0 and Firewire, whereas the drive speed limits the transfer speed with eSATA.

I wonder why the access time is so much longer on the Firewire benchmark as compared to the USB 2.0 and eSATA benchmarks though.

 

Yeah i didnt make a mention of it but you can clearly see a performance line in the USB 2.0, not as clear in the FireWire as its not processor controlled but its still very much there.

 

You can save $20 on those HDD dock by buying them off
www.dealextreme.com

 

Thanks for this. I had expected to see Firewire running a bit faster. eSATA is the way forward. Unless you have damaged something on the power circuit, eSATA should run because it is a simple pass-through connector.

Normally I buy my enclosures and HDD separately. The enclosure kits usually include a full set of cables.

John

 

It was firewire 400, a firewire 800 would be much closer to esata. I think mostly firewire is dead on the pc side of things, but the camecorders and what not still use it.

 

yup, your right! but wait till USB 3.0 (4.8Gb/s)... then firewire will be a gonner.

 

The eSATA when it worked would freeze the system for a moment upon plugin, it still does that only permenantly until i unplug it. Under all three the machine wouldnt past post like some WD drives do out of the box.

I tested another drive on it and nothing they both power and i was able to test the second drive afterwards on a sata to usb adapter and it worked fine so i believe the drive is okay its just the controller whom the led's dont light up except when i plug it in. Pretty sure i blew a cap when i tried to force the metal cover to slide off.

If its just a pass through I might buy a sata to esata cable for now and use my molex to sata power to use it as a backup. I already decided this is just gonna go in the desktop when it gets built.

 

Re the eSATA locking the system, are you running the latest (8.8) version of the Intel Matrix Storage software (assuming that the computer has an Intel chipset). This version fixed a lot of bugs.

John

 

I've beenusing the same drive through eSATA for quite some time and never experienced this freezing issue. The only slightly annoying thing is that i always have to "import foreign disk" through disk management if i plug the HDD in while Windows is already running. No such issue if i plug it in before boot though.

 

Interesting Problem

@ John nah havent touched the intel software, once i get my esata to sata cable and then hack the enclosure up to hold my ide externals power supply and then route the cable out the back and call it fixed I will give that a shot.

 

Nice review! I bought this ehhd about 4 months ago and have just one issue... It freezes up my pc. I've used it under windows vista and windows 7, both 64-bit. From time to time my PC freezes up and the only way to get it going again is by rebooting through hitting the reset button. When it happens the light on the MyBook turns off and then on, like it does when you start the computer. When I unplugged it, everything worked fine, no freezes in about three days. When used with USB it works fine too... It seems it's only eSata that freezes my pc, but I bought this (slightly more expensive) version of the drive just for the eSata. Bah.
What should I do? Contact WD? I don't want to send them my drive, since I can't backup 1tb... Could I take it out of its casing and use it like a normal drive?

Sorry if this is a bit off-topic.

 

A late post; looking for a solution with this new 1.5 WD my book that totally locks up my laptop using eSata. My Thermaltake and Seagate eSata works fine over same port on vista laptop.

Now I'm using the FW interface transferring a 350 gig file in just 1 hour and 10 minutes. Count me a firewire fanboy..this cut off 1 hour and 66 minutes prior file transfer using USB 2.0. This is a REAL world file transfer, not a synthetic test. I'm doing this because the triple interface drive may be going back if I cannot find a driver update for the intel 82801 driver.

 

Maybe ur Chipset drivers are not working? try installing the latest intel chipset drivers...

 

Yep. It's all about your laptops chipset and triple interface chipsets. I borrowed an esata express card and drive works much better. However my Thermaltake drive dock blows the doors off the mybook using realtime and HD Tune. The web is flooded with lock ups on certain dell laptops as well. Check out WD forums.

Oh well, back to BB.