Western Digital My Book Home Edition review

Western Digital's drives tend to stand out a bit more than some of the others that arrive in the PC Pro 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 two desktop drives this month 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 other eSATA-equipped drive, from Buffalo, was faster - albeit by fractions of a second.

The Western Digital also includes an enormously generous warranty. When most other drives this month offer a year or two of support, the My Book comes with a superb five-year warranty.

You're paying for this versatility and support, however. Costing 20.9p per gigabyte, it's the most expensive desktop drive on test this month - especially when you consider that you can spend less money - £58 - and double your storage with the 640GB Verbatim.

If you're willing to trade storage space for features and speed, though, the Western Digital is a good investment: plenty of interfaces and a superb warranty make for a versatile and dependable package.

Author: Mike Jennings