Digital Trends

Western Digital My Book Home Edition (1TB)

November 28th, 2007 | by Josh Norem

Features and Design

The biggest exterior change to the new My Book is its sleek new shell. Its curves seem a bit softer and there is a new activity light. The old model had two circles: one for activity, and one circle that filled up as the drive was loaded with files. This new version has just a single LED strip, Knight Rider-style, that bounces back and forth during activity and then lights up as you fill the drive up. Also, rather than a bright blue light, the new display is silver and easier on the eyes.

There are also three interfaces now. Yep, that’s three, with a T. There’s USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and eSATA. This is sure to please PC users, Mac folks, and those on the bleeding edge with eSATA. Sadly, the package includes a USB 2.0 cable and a FireWire cable, but no eSATA cable. You can purchase a 3 foot eSATA cable from WD for $10 USD if you want the speed boost afforded by the eSATA interface.

The drive’s capacity is a staggering 1TB. Though some might say “You should never put that much data on one drive,” we say you don’t understand the concept of using a “backup” drive, which is where the data on the drive is a duplicate copy of data on another drive. Therefore, one could use the My Book to back up data from two 500GB internal drives. You should never put any data, regardless of size, on just one drive if it’s important to you. The beauty of large backup drives is that they let you backup multiple smaller drives.

On the software side WD has jumped ship from Dantz to Memeo. Even though the company still calls its software WD Anywhere, it is using Memeo, which is also used by Buffalo on its external drives. Overall it’s excellent software that instantly backs up any files that are added to a backup source. WD has also thrown in a bunch of free Google software, including Picasa, Google Toolbar and Google Desktop.

Image Courtesy of Western Digital