Western Digital My Book 3.0 Review Discussion

The Western Digital MyBook 3.0 is a new 1TB external drive packing a new Super-Speed USB 3.0 interface. For those who might not be up to date on the latest connection standards, USB 3.0 offers much greater speeds than the older USB 2.0 standard. In this review, we put the MyBook USB 3.0 hard drive through its paces to see how well it performs.

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Well, that's a little disappointing.

 

eSATA is still better, how disappointing.

 

The important thing to keep in mind is that eSATA doesn't carry power (at least not standard eSATA).

This makes eSATA fine for desktops (I actually have two eSATA drives at home connected to my desktop) but notebooks will benefit more from the USB 3.0 standard that carries data and power over a single cable.

True, the USB 3.0 adapter card that came with this drive doesn't perform as well as a standard SATA connection, but it's still WAY faster than USB 2.0 ... and you only need one cable with USB 3.0 instead of two cables with eSATA.

 

True, but it seems to me that a lot of the notebooks I've been looking at recently have the combo eSATA/USB port, and it's not that difficult to get an enclosure that has a single cable that can both use eSATA while pulling power from the USB portion of that port.

Still and all, perhaps this is just a fault of the USB 3.0 adapter card, and that a USB 3.0 port from another manufacturer would perform better. The thing is, unless you have a machine with USB 3.0 already, you're kind of stuck with what they give you, and in that respect it still feels disappointing, unless this is just a problem with the particular MyBook implementation.

Oh, and in this case, being a power-hungry 3.5" HDD, wouldn't it need a wall adapter anyway? Or is USB 3.0 actually powerful enough to power the 3.5" HDD?

 

Peak power draw from the drive during the first five or ten seconds while it is spinning up it requires over 30 watts of power. If you could pull that from a USB port I will eat my own hat

I would have loved to try the drive out with another USB3 device but everything we have seen so far uses the same NEC USB3 controller chip. This includes the PCIe card from this kit, the HP EliteBooks, and a new AMD board that was in the office.

It might still be early to say this is a problem with USB3 as it could just be a problem with the NEC chip right now.

 

Understood. I guess we'll just have to wait and see other USB 3.0 peripherals become available and see the benchmarks for those before we can make a final judgement. It's still a little disappointing for right now, though, since it seems a _lot_ of people are waiting for USB 3.0 to become mainstream, and if this speed "problem" is actually endemic to USB 3.0 as just opposed to this particular implementation, a lot of people are going to be very disappointed.

 

Great review, thanks for comparing usb 3.0 and SATA! That was the one thing to look at.

 

Yes indeed ... I also think that when usb 3.0 becomes more "standardized" we will be able to get a clearer idea of whether or no this is just a slow first out of the gate performance.