Thread: THE WESTERN DIGITAL MyBook Premium

THE 3.5 AND 2.5 inch drives were tested using a range of synthetic as well as real-world tests. The drives were connected to a fast PC (Core 2 Duo, Intel BadAxe Motherboard, 2 GB RAM), run¬ning a fresh install of Windows Vista. We used Lavalys Software's Everest benchmarking tool to get random and linear read and write speeds and average access times.

This provides a good basis of comparison between the various drives. For real-world tests, we measured the time taken to copy a 886 MB folder full of 239 files of various sizes, and a 4.32 GB ISO image. All tests were run thrice, and the results averaged. For the NAS boxes, we connected them to the PC with a cross-cable and conducted the same real-world tests. We also tested the web-interface for ease of use and features.

TO ENSURE A fair result, we have only taken the USB scores into account. Buffalo pro¬vides a special driver that speeds up the USB transfer, and this pushed it to first place in the performance tests. The linear read tests touched 40 MB/second, and the random write speeds were a fantastic 31 MB/s. The real world tests bore this out, with the folder getting copied in 34 sec¬onds, and the ISO file in 151 seconds. This translates to 26 MB/s and 31 MB/s. The average access times of 18.46 milli¬seconds was the only let down. In second place, the MyBook Essential was speedy with a linear read speed of 32 MB/s, and a write speed 26 MB/s. Real-world speeds were at 41 seconds for the 886 MB folder, and 179 seconds for the ISO. Access times were really good, at only 13.17 ms.

The other two MyBooks, and the ExBoot 250 were neck and neck behind the top two. In fact, for all practical purposes, these three drives were identical. Seagate's performance was a slight let down after the high expectations it raised. Plugged in under eSATA or FireWire, its performance jumped up, and it seemed that the USB controller in the drive was hampering it. FireWire was much speedier than USB in general, with perfor- mance gains on the order of 20-30 percent on all drives that supported it.

Featurewise, most of the drives were similar. Except for the My Book Essential,
all of them came with some form of back¬up software. The ExBoot was unique in claiming that its software would setup the external drive as a bootable drive (hence
the name, ExBoot), but besides this, all of them had the usual backup features. You can schedule backups, encrypt data, and set-up one-touch backups.







WESTERN DIGITAL continued its winning ways by coming up trumps in the Z.5 inch OF THE SIX desktop drives, the Seagate Free Agent Pro 750 made an immediate impression. Looking like a piece of sculpture rather than a disk drive, the Free Agent caught the eye of everyone who walked into the PC World labs. The three Western Digital's My Book drives look like books, and can be comfortably accommodated on your bookshelf. Buffalo sticks to the old school grey-and¬sturdy look, and ExBoot did not do anything special with their design.

Buffalo and Ex Boot were the only two 250GB drives, and had only a USB port to connect to the computer. The three MyBooks were all 500GB drives. The difference was in the software supplied and the choice of connections. The MyBook Essential does not have any backup software, and only a USB port. The My Book Premium Edi¬tion comes with a FireWire 400 port in addition to the USB port, backup software, and a handy disk usage indicator.

The top-end MyBook Pro throws in two FireWire 800 ports along with the FireWire 400 and USB port, and better backup software. The Seagate FreeAgent had the most connectivity options as well as the largest capacity. The default connection is one USB, and one eSATA port, and there's a little user-swappable module that has two FireWire 400 ports.