Western Digital My Book 3.0 review

The My Book 3.0 is Western Digital’s first USB 3 external hard drive, a 1TB unit that comes conveniently bundled with a two-port PCI-E x1 USB 3 controller card. If your PC has USB 3 already, you can buy the drive sans controller for around a tenner less, but right now we suspect there are few punters in that happy position.

Once hooked up to a suitable port, the My Book 3.0’s performance leaves older devices in the dust. Admittedly, it’s not as fast as Western Digital’s marketing would suggest: you won’t see a ten-times speed-up compared to USB 2, because the SATA hard disk inside the unit simply can’t transfer data that fast. But in our large file copy tests the My Book averaged a read speed of 120MB/sec and a write speed of 88MB/sec – more than three times the speed of a typical USB 2 drive.

When we tried copying our folder of 3,000 small files, things inevitably slowed down, but the My Book still averaged a read rate of 58MB/sec and a write speed of 31MB/sec, more than doubling the speeds we’d expect from a USB 2 drive.

It’s worth noting that Buffalo’s competing USB 3 drive, the HD-HXU3, achieved even faster write speeds than the My Book in some of our tests, topping 110MB/sec when writing large files. That drive faltered in the small file test, however, taking over 90 seconds to write our 3,000 files while Western Digital’s unit whizzed through the exercise in a tenth of the time.

Ergonomically, the My Book 3.0 is a simple design: the case is a low-key tower, not much bigger than the 3.5in hard disk within, with nothing to see from the front but a tiny activity LED. At the back there’s a power button, a slot for a Kensington lock, a power socket and one micro-USB 3 port – effectively a regular micro-USB socket with additional pins at the side. There’s no bundled software, just a user manual in PDF form.

Since USB 3 isn’t yet an established technology, it’s no surprise that the My Book 3.0 is more expensive than a comparable USB 2 drive. But the price seems unreasonably high when you consider that Buffalo’s (admittedly less consistent) 1TB model comes in at just £78 exc VAT. Indeed, for the cost of the My Book 3.0 you could buy a USB 2 drive of double the capacity.

For now, therefore, we can’t recommend the My Book 3.0. All the same, it’s clear that USB 3 is gathering momentum, and as demand grows there’s scope for prices to plummet. So let’s keep our fingers crossed that it won’t be long before Western Digital is able to deliver the blazing performance of USB 3 at a more palatable price.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith