WD My Book 4TB Desktop USB 3.0 External Hard Drive Storage WDBACW0040HBK-NESN

Pros: I like the 6 foot power cable that came with this drive, which is a foot longer than normal. When I plugged this drive into my USB 3.0 port, Windows 7(64bit) instantly recognized it as “WD My Book 1140 USB Device” and made it available for use. The drive inside has a variable spin speed set during manufacturing to offer the best balance between temperature and power use, but it can mean that performance may vary from disk to disk. The USB3.0 interface definitely made this drive faster than other USB 2.0 drives, or when plugged into a USB2.0 port, as it achieved 82MB/s writes and 95MB/s reads in large file transfer tests, which is in the top performing desktop hard disks that I’ve looked at. Small file transfers were somewhat slower, which is normally the case in storage tests – 26MB/s writes and 45MB/s read speeds, which is about average for a drive this size.

After testing the drive with SMART tests and disk check, I successfully copied a mirrored backup of 6,972 files, or 910.62GB of the 931.48GB available from another 1TB drive in my PC. This took about 5 hours to do.

I plan on using it as a simple redundant back up drive to hide away in my fire protected safe for 6 month intervals, and for this purpose the drive is great. There is also a power button on the back of the drive which is a nice addition to the My Book Essentials lineup.

Cons: I did not install the SmartWare backup program because I already have a paid version of SyncBackPro which offers superb amounts of utility and options, and it did not offer me the option of installation location, which I really don’t like, so I have no comments on this program. Also, when installing SmartWare, it tries to sneak in an installation of McAfee antivirus free. I consider this bloatware since it’s something I did not want and do not need, so watch out for that if you don’t want it.

The only major complaint I have about this drive is the time it takes to “wake up” or spin up from sleep mode. It takes a full 15 seconds. My older external USB drive only takes 5 seconds to wake from sleep mode. This makes the sleep function very undesirable if you are using this drive for daily activity (which you can disable in the software settings).

My other gripe about the drive is that you can buy the 3TB version of the drive for just 50 bucks more. The terabyte to dollar ratio is significantly less for the 1TB version, but if you don’t want to spend the extra 50 bucks, go for it, as it’s still a very decently priced 1TB external storage device.

Overall Review: IN THE BOX: Simple picture installation sheet, warranty and tech support guide, power cable, USB 3.0 cable, and My Book Essentials drive. The 32 bit and 64 bit drivers, a detailed manual (written in 23 languages in .pdf format), and the WD SmartWare program for PC and Mac are on the NTFS formatted drive ready for installation. WD SmartWare is a data backup and restoration program that comes installed on Western Digital external hard drives. The program runs as a virtual CD-ROM drive on your system. The WD SmartWare software allows you to perform a selective backup of the data on your primary hard drive, and then restore the backup from the external drive when necessary. It also comes with a formatting utility, and a drive lock utility that allows you to password protect your external drive so it can’t be used by those without it. I was pleased with the overall looks of the drive, which is shiny piano black with rounded corners and edges keeping it from looking too boxy. There are cooling vents in the top back side and top edge of the casing but no active cooling fans. This should be sufficient cooling for the WD green drive inside as long as you don’t seal off the venting somehow. In the front of the drive unit, there is a pinhole with a white LED light behind it that blinks when accessing the drive, and is solid ‘on’ otherwise.

Total capacity is 1,000,169,533,440 bytes (931GB). Approximately 930 GB of actual storage space is typical for an advertised 1TB drive, and it is a common misconception between Binary and Decimal drive capacity, and will be witnessed for any storage device. Information regarding specifications for the differentiation between Binary and Decimal drive capacities can be found by viewing the information provided by this link on WD’s website. http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/615

Here is a link to the online user manual on WD’s website. http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/UM/ENG/4779-705019.pdf

Pros: This drive stands on the desk like a book. It looks like a book and is heavy enough to stay put. Has a small white activity light that can be seen even at extreme angles. Very fast with USB 3. Windows reported a speed of about 1.2Gb/s (150MB/s)both up and down. Faster than my 2.5inch external drives. Is recognized and installed automatically on both Windows 7 and Windows XP with no problems. Quiet operation.

Cons: Drive requires the included external power pack so you need an additional power receptacle.

Overall Review: I set this drive on the desk, plugged in and it acts just like a drive installed inside the machine. It looks really good on my desk and doesn’t get in the way like the smaller pocket size drives that I have where I have to be careful not to catch the cable with something and sweep it off onto the floor. This drive stands right next to the computer and makes a good permanent backup drive. The supplied external transformer is required since it is a 3.5 inch form factor drive, but my power strip had an empty spot for it.

Pros: Very attractive 1 Tb external hard drive with ventilation holes (that in prior models were actually readable morse code). It looks like a book, has a USB 3 interface and comes with a separate power adapter. The power light is unobtrusive. Inside the case (don’t do this with yours) I found an IntelliPower 1Tb WD10EUCX with a 6GB/s SATA connector. It comes with some bundled (free) software that is intended to make it more useful for backup, to control some drive parameters, and to do diagnostics. The software is not necessary to use the drive. It has a Drive Power button on the back. It is backwardly compatible with USB2. It comes with a 4 foot long USB3 cable. It has a 2 year warranty. The retail packaging protects the drive very well, so even if the retail package is shipped poorly, the drive should arrive OK. It’s obvious that thought went into the design and user criticisms on the older models have been taken seriously by the company.

Choosing an external drive in the 1TB and up range depends a lot your purpose for it. If you have a light laptop with a small fast internal drive (SSD), need something to hold your data with more capacity than a USB stick, and intend to take it with you everywhere — consider a smaller capacity, 2.5 inch portable drive that runs power & data over a single cable. The MyBook, seems ideal for less-portable use to: back-up a computer while at home, backup a server and then move the data off-site for safety, attach more storage to your entertainment system, attach a drive to the USB port on your advanced router to make a pseudo-NAS, backup a mirrored two-disk Buffalo LinkStation nightly via the USB port, add storage to your server via USB when all the SATA ports are taken, use it for Time Machine on a Mac.

Which connection is best? The common options in external drives include: USB2, USB3, eSATA, and firewire. USB 2.0 maxes out at 60 MByte/sec using “High-Speed”. USB 3.0 maxes out at 625 MB/sec (about 5Gb/s) using “Super-Speed” and can pass SMART data. My testing of the WD10EUCX disk hooked directly via SATA gets about 93MB/sec average transfer rate (HD Tune). That becomes the limiting factor if you have USB3. With USB3and the drive inside the My Book enclosure I get about 90 MB/sec average transfer rate — so USB3 works pretty well. (Same test with USB2 got me 33 MB/sec.) All the 1Tb USB3-only externals were comparable in price when I looked today, and were only slightly more expensive than the cheapest, bare 1Tb internal drive. In this particular case, the same-type bare drive on newegg today was actually slightly more expensive. The next option is eSATA. It’s similar in function to just hooking up the drive directly to the motherboard and appears to carry a premium of about $20 more than the USB3 drives – don’t know why. Firewire 800/IEEE1394b supports up to 400 MB/s and seems to carry a premium of about $50-$100 over just USB3.

My take on the software is in the Other Thoughts section.

Cons: Depending on your purpose, top speed may be an issue. It appears this product is designed for energy efficiency (it is a green drive), and to be durable/reliable/cool/easy to use as backup. The speed is sufficient to stream video, stream FLAC audio, and backup a desktop while you are sleeping. It is not designed to be the fastest for copying thousands of small files in the shortest possible time.

Overall Review: OS compatability & provided software: I tried this on XP, Win7, Mac laptop, Linux, FreeBSD, and a couple network appliances.

The drive comes formatted as NTFS (the older models came as fat32) with an MBR partition scheme. If you plan on storing files greater than 4 Gb in size, keep it as NTFS on Win. The driver automatically installed for me on Win 7. If you are using mac you’ll want to reformat with HFS+. To do this you’ll either need to use the provided software or to do it manually you need to go to Partition Map, hit the Options button and change the boot record scheme to GUID from MBR (if you don’t, Disk Utility may give you an error message that says there was an unknown error with the partition map). I’ve also tested formatting this drive on Linux as XFS and EXT3. I’ve tested that it can be used as a backup disk with a Buffalo Linkstation RAID1 NAS on the USB port. I’ve tested that this disk mounts on FreeNAS 8.3.0-RC1 with two different ASUS AMD mbs with USB2. This gives you a fast option to move data in/out of a redundant FreeNAS server without using network bandwidth. I’ve also tried the drive on a Netgear 3500L router flashed with Tomato as an inexpensive pseudo-NAS/BitTorrent storage.

The optional software experience is similar in look and feel on both Windows and Mac. There is a “WD Quick Formatter” with Win/Mac versions. There is a suite of management/diagnostics/computer backup/driver software called “Smartware” that lets you install only the parts you need. For Mac there is an optional “WD + turbo” driver that improves the file transfer speeds (about 10%) and a backup option that is more granular than Time Machine. If you plan on using the drive as a “usually-connected and on” drive it will keep your data automatically backed up with file versioning with a reversion count of up to 25. There is an interesting display that graphically categorizes the files by type and shows you what has been backed up. The software allows you to set Drive Sleep/Password Protection/Run SMART tests.

I have had five of the older 1 Tb USB2 drives for a long time and they are still working fine. I use two of them for nightly automatic backup images of a couple of RAID1 NAS devices in always-connected mode. I use the other two to store laptop backups, rotating one unit off-site. The fifth is my general purpose portable utility drive that goes in the suitcase when I travel. I’ve used it to offload my parent’s data when upgrading their computer; I’ve used it to carry around a portable version of my LightRoom catalog. I’ve had good luck with the 1 Tb Green drives as internal disks for data storage (not system drives) in desktops. Backup and redundancy are not optional if you value your data. Drives fail. A high-capacity portable drive with a separate power supply is often a good component in a comprehensive backup strategy.

Pros: Overall this is a wonderful hard drive for what it is, 3TB of storage (2.728 TiB), enough to store ~19,070 episodes (~11 months runtime) of 720p High10 10-bit anime, or ~11.5 years worth of HE-AACv2 stereo music. With that much music, I don’t know what would finish first, your playlist or the drive failing? Due to the nature of the size is the mainly for long term storage that isn’t moved often. The best part about buying external hard drives is you can easily use them as internal hard drives if you wish to. If you have a USB3 port you won’t need to use it internally to get the maximum speed of the drive. The following tests were done on a USB3 port.

CrystalMark Benchmark
Test | Read | Write
Sequential | 133MB/s | 132MB/s
512K Random | 44MB/s | 73MB/s
4K Random | .55MB/s | 1.25MB/s

ATTO Benchmark
Transfer | Read | Write
4K | 36MB/s | 35MB/s
8K | 56MB/s | 61MB/s
16K | 88MB/s | 90MB/s
32K | 105MB/s | 110MB/s
64K | 130MB/s | 130MB/s
128K | 133MB/s | 132MB/s

Cons: * Must have an available power outlet nearby in order to utilize this drive on your system if wanting to use it externally, the power from your USB2/3 port will not power the drive by itself.
* Software is available for Windows and Mac, but not Linux.
* Backup software automatically categorizes all files on your computer instead of backing up specific files, so plenty of junk will also be copied in the backup process. For example, the software determines that ALL pictures on the drive must be backed up, or ALL videos on the drive must be backed up, this isn’t very efficient.
* Bulky unit due to 3TB of platters, consider using internally if you do not need the portability.

Overall Review: For those who are too accustomed to looking at Windows’ false capacity readings and wonder why Windows states the drive is 2.73TB instead of 3TB, when a manufacturer states that the drive is 3TB, it is indeed 3TB, Windows reports the Tebibyte (TiB) variant rather than the Terabyte (TB) variant. 3TB converted to TiB is 2.728TiB, which Windows reports as 2.72TB. If you are using Linux, your system already displays the correct formats of TB and TiB.
Although the drive’s included software sucks, there is plenty of third party tools you may use.

Pros: Massive amount of storage (2.72 TB formatted).

USB 3.0 results in much faster performance than USB 2.0

Build quality is great and these run silently and cool.

With the prices of HDDs so (artificially!) inflated currently, $190 is actually a pretty good buy for 3 TB of storage.

Cons: None so far… maybe they could be a bit quicker but if you’re buying this for anything other than a data storage drive then you don’t know what you are doing. And these are more than fast enough to be a data storage drive.

Overall Review: My wife and I recently had a baby and I wanted to get a large storage solution to store and backup pictures and videos of the kid, which will become a massive collection over a couple years.

Ideally, I wanted an internal 2 or 3 TB Raid 1 setup, but prices are so crazy right now that I wasn’t willing to spend the money on that. I saw the $190 price on these, and decided to just get two of them and then schedule SyncToy to mirror the data on them. It’s a crude RAID 1 replacement that does the trick, and I love the way 2 of these looks next to my monitor 🙂

Pros: Fast, quiet, well priced

Cons: None so far.

Overall Review: I received this drive as a replacement for a dying WD drive I bought from Newegg 18 mos ago. At the time WDs warranty had been reduced to one year. Because I wrote a review on Newegg unhappy with my situation, WD responded and sent me a brand new (not refurbished) USB 3.0 unit when I had RMA’d a USB 2.0. WD even paid for shipping both ways. The power of Newegg!!

I see that my new drive has a warranty of two years. Seagate still only offers one. I think I’ll be sticking with WD despite the bad drive I got.

Pros: It’s Western Digital – A world leader in HDD technology.

3TB of space – Reported as 2.72TB. Windows reports TiB (tebibyte) as TB (terabyte), this is normal. 2.72TiB is 3TB.

USB 3.0 / 2.0

Nice overall design and aesthetic. Looks good sitting on your desk.

Quiet, well ventilated, well built enclosure.

2 year limited warranty at the time of this review. Don’t forget to register!

I have been a long time “power user” of Western Digital HDD’s, since the late 1980’s. Over that long time span, I have only had a few drives fail on me. To put that in perspective, that’s over 20 years of Western Digital HDD usage, and in that time frame I can count the number of drives that failed on me, while in use, on one hand. I am not saying this unit will hold up to my past experience, but it’s a pretty good track record in my opinion.

Cons: The biggest con I have for this device has nothing to do with the device itself, but the WD Smartware software.

The software is easy to use, can run diagnostics on the unit, secure the data on the unit, and things of that nature. However when it comes to automated backups, it falls short. Mainly because you can not select individual files or folders to backup.

It scans a drive you select and organizes the data into categories, like pictures, movies, music, movies, mail, documents, and “other”. You can then select to backup any or all of those categories, but not any of the individual files or folders within those categories. So you can’t pick what you want to backup, it’s all or nothing within those specified categories. So you can easily end up with a lot of unwanted data being backed up.

I considered knocking off an egg, since people who buy a drive like this, will likely be using it for backups, and automated backups are a key part of that and should be very flexible and configurable. However, I decided not too since this is something that can easily be addressed by Western Digital with a future software update. In fact, right after I submit this review, I am going to suggest it to them.

Of course, you can still easily do manual backups, or use other 3rd party backup software if you choose.

Overall Review: Like with most all HDD’s, internal and external, it benchmarked higher than it performed under real usage conditions. However, the real numbers I got on my system were still pretty nice to see. On average, a single large file transferred at about 60Mb/s. Large numbers of smaller files transferred at about 35Mb/s. All on USB 3.0. Not bad at all. Of course, take these numbers with a grain of salt since not everyone will get the exact same results. Overall, the speeds are fast and the drive is quick to respond with my system.

Basically, this is a Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB HDD in a quality external enclosure. So it’s perfectly suited for this purpose.

It does require external power obviously , via a standard AC/DC wall adapter, so make sure you have a place to plug it in.

I also connected the unit to the Western Digital MyNetN900 router and it was instantly recognized. So this would make a great network storage and/or media streaming device as well.

Right now, I am using the drive to store movies, music, games, disk images, and as a Steam backup drive. It’s working fantastic!

Overall, I think this is a great product. Nice large capacity, great performance, and quiet. I can find no faults with the hardware. I have not had any issues with the drive at all, and it’s been running 24/7 with it sleeping after 10 minutes of inactivity. The WD Smartware software is its only hindrance in my opinion, and it would be an easy fix for Western Digital to add individual file and folder backup selection.

Pros: Lots of storage, USB 3.0, worked when first hooked up, but I don’t know what to expect long term, considering the negative reviews.

Cons: Just got it at my local warehouse store for 120. Hard drive prices are sure crazy right now.

Overall Review: Can’t wait for sanity to return.