By Carlo C. Gutierrez
February 1, 2010

It’s a Western Digital (WD) party in the office this November as we received another storage device from WD. Following the USB 3.0 refresh of most of their external hard drives, the company sent in a WD My Book Essential USB 3.0.

Aside from the change from USB 2.0 to USB 3.0, the WD My Book Essential USB 3.0 has increased its capacity size to up to 3TB from the past 1TB and 2TB variants. Like most USB 3.0 external drives, it requires the new data cable that is different from the standard mini-USB but it is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 ports.

As seen on the photo, the WD My Book Essential USB 3.0 follows the same design as previous WD My Book Essentials but with a different data port. It still has the same glossy material finish which we all love to leave our fingerprints on.

As is the standard with most WD external hard drives, WD SmartWare comes bundled with the hardware and can be downloaded from the company’s site in case of data loss or accidental formats without backups.

We used HD Tune, HD Tach and AIDA64 to measure the device’s data transfer speeds. We ran the same tests using a USB 3.0 compatible motherboard and another with just USB 2.0.

As can be seen on the table, the WD My Book Essential 3.0 performs faster on a USB 3.0 interface as expected. However, we noticed that it did better across the board on our tests compared to the WD My Passport Essential USB 3.0.

With up to 3TB models, WD’s My Book Essential USB 3.0 is an excellent portable storage option for media sharers on the go.

Western Digital, a storage industry pioneer, announced it is now shipping its new WD Scorpio Black 750 GB 7200 RPM 2.5-inch SATA hard drives for high-performance notebook computers and portable storage devices.

One of the fastest hard drives on the market, WD Scorpio Black drives combine class-leading 7200 RPM spin speed and 16 MB cache to deliver maximum notebook performance. Now available in capacities up to 750 GB, this new WD offering provides creative professionals, gamers and PC enthusiasts with the additional capacity they need. Using the Advanced Format (AF) technology, the WD Scorpio Black 750 GB hard drives also incorporate a variety of data-protection features to actively monitor and protect valuable data.

The entire family of WD Scorpio Black hard drives is designed for use in OEM notebook systems and has been tested across multiple platforms to allow anyone a successful upgrade of speed and performance to their current notebook system.

WD Scorpio Black 750 GB hard drives (model number WD7500BPKT) are now available in the Philippines from select resellers. MSRP for the WD Scorpio Black 750 GB hard drive is PhP5,795. WD Scorpio Black 750 GB hard drives are covered by a five-year limited warranty and are distributed by Verdure Xchange Tech Inc. and PC Trends Inc. in the Philippines.

Western Digital, a provider of external storage solutions and maker of the WD TV media player family, introduced the WD TV Live Hub media center, a Full-HD 1080p media player with a 1TB built-in network hard drive that allows users to play their personal media on any screen in the home.

The WD TV Live Hub media center brings new experiences to the WD TV family, including instantly renting or purchasing the newest releases through Blockbuster On Demand service, the same day as DVD/Blu-ray release, as well as interacting with personal Facebook communities.

The WD TV Live Hub media center plays a wide variety of media file types, including popular Full-HD 1080p video formats such as .mkv, .mp4 and .mov.

The integrated, compact and quiet 1TB hard drive enables users to centralize their digital media from multiple sources for smooth, glitch-free playback of even the highest resolution videos. Digital media can be easily transferred to the internal drive from shared folders on PCs and Macs on the network or directly from external hard drives, thumb drives, camcorders or cameras connected via one of the two USB ports. Users also can stream videos from home network drives with a DLNA/UPnP server such as the My Book Live home network drive.

WD has announced that the company is shipping the world’s largest capacity SATA hard drive. As the latest addition to its WD Caviar Green family of SATA hard drives, the new hard drives deliver up to a massive 3 terabytes (TB) of storage capacity on a single drive. WD is leading the industry in capacity for SATA hard drives by utilizing 750 GB-per-platter areal density and Advanced Format (AF) technology.

WD Caviar Green drives are an eco-friendly storage solution with WD GreenPower Technology, which reduces power consumption by enabling lower operating temperatures for increased reliability and decreases acoustical noise for quiet operation. The WD Caviar Green 2.5 TB and 3 TB hard drives are designed for use as secondary external storage and next-generation PC storage in 64 bit-based systems.

Drives with capacities in excess of 2.19 TB currently present barriers for PC hardware, firmware and software. To satisfy the new set of requirements of which users must be aware to successfully integrate larger capacity drives, WD is bundling its WD Caviar Green 2.5 and 3 TB hard drives with an Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI)-compliant Host Bus Adapter (HBA), which will enable the operating system to use a known driver with correct support for large capacity drives. For more information on solving the 2.19 TB drive barrier, see the WD information sheet at http://products.wdc.com/largecapacitydrives.

“WD remains a leader of hard drive capacity and low power innovation. With our WD Caviar Green drives, we enable energy-conscious customers to build systems with the highest capacities that deliver the optimal balance of system performance, ensured reliability and energy conservation,” said Jim Morris, executive vice president and general manager of WD’s client systems storage group. “Customers will be able to take advantage of this breakthrough capacity point now for secondary external storage in legacy 32-bit systems that run on Microsoft Vista or Windows 7 platforms.”

WD Caviar Green 2.5 TB hard drives (model number WD25EZRSDTL) and 3 TB hard drives (model number WD30EZRSDTL) are available now in the Philippines at select resellers and distributors. MSRP for the WD Caviar Green 2.5 TB hard drive is Peso 9,795.00 and the 3 TB hard drive is Peso 12,595.00. WD Caviar Green hard drives are covered by a three-year limited warranty. More information about WD Caviar Green hard drives may be found on the company’s website at http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=866.

WD, one of the storage industry’s pioneers and long-time leaders, provides products and services for people and organizations that collect, manage and use digital information. The company designs and produces reliable, high-performance hard drives and solid state drives that keep users’ data accessible and secure from loss. Its advanced technologies are configured into applications for client and enterprise computing, embedded systems and consumer electronics, as well as its own consumer storage and media products.

WD was founded in 1970. The company’s storage products are marketed to leading OEMs, systems manufacturers, selected resellers and retailers under the Western Digital and WD brand names. Visit the Investor section of the company’s website (www.westerndigital.com) to access a variety of financial and investor information.

Western Digital, a manufacturer of external storage solutions, has introduced a new dedicated multimedia drive that stores as much as two terabytes of consumers’ digital videos, photos and music for playback on big-screen home theater systems in up to Full-HD 1080p resolution. The WD Elements Play multimedia drive will run most of the file formats popular with consumers for their personal content, including H.264, MKV, .MOV and Real Media’s RMVB, which is popular in the Asia-Pacific region.

The new WD Elements Play multimedia drive streamlines the task of managing personal media collections by combining high-capacity storage with a high-definition media player. Users now can aggregate their personal media collection into one library and play them on the largest screen and highest fidelity sound system in their home – all from the same simple device. The multimedia drive attaches directly to the user’s television set with composite video or HDMI connections for Full-HD 1080p resolution.

By Carlo C. Gutierrez
September 1, 2010

Every now and then we get requests to go back in time and take a look at products that aren’t necessarily new. This product review is a response to precisely such a request. Western Digital’s My Passport Essential series has been around for quite a while, but we reviewed it nonetheless to see if it’s still a viable option given today’s portable storage needs. The My Passport Essential line features the same simplistic design of

My Passport Elite though the material finish used is glossy instead of matte. Glossy designs tend to be magnets for smudges and fingerprints but potential buyers probably will not mind. The unit itself is petite, measuring only 83x110x15mm and weighing a mere 0.2 kg. That’s about the same size as a man’s palm (provided he’s not a six-footer basketball jock with outsized hands). The portable storage device has a single port – a mini-USB that’s used for data transfer and power. Right beside this port is an LED which signals connectivity and file transfer. The included cable is 11 inches long though it could have been longer. A minor nitpick, really. We used HD Tune and HD Tach to test the device. It got 32.5MB/s average read, 17.6ms access time, and 33.3MB/s burst rate in HD Tune and 34.5MB/s, 17.4ms, 37.7MB/s in HD Tach. During operation, temperature levels stayed at 40°C and capped at 42°C. WD’s My Passport Essential is available in different storage capacities (250GB, 320GB, 500GB and 640GB) and colors (arctic white, black, pacific blue, real red and cool silver).

With a starting price point of around P3,000 and requiring only a single cable, the WD My Passport Essential series is very portable and inexpensive. It’s simple and cool design is also a definite plus.

By Carlo C. Gutierrez
September 1, 2010

Widely known for its quality storage devices, be it internal or portable drives, Western Digital (WD) has ventured out from its usual product offerings with release of the WD TV Mini. Measuring a measly 91x91x22mm, it’s much smaller compared to its older brother, the WD TV HD. Along with the size cut, WD has added and removed some functions in the WD TV Mini. Similar in size and even smaller (in some cases) than an average wallet, the WD TV Mini has a pleasant black matte finish on its top and bottom. At the front are WD’s logo, blue LED displays, and the receiver for the included remote. At the backside of the device are the output connections, including an audiovisual port and a component port. WD dropped the HDMI port from the WD Mini TV so be warned if you want to use this for your monitor or to play HD videos. The layout of the buttons on the remote control is intuitive enough andall the functions are neatly labeled. The remote uses two AAA batteries. The media player does not have a built-in storage but it does provide a single USB port where users can plug in external storage devices. With the loss of the HDMI port, the WD TV Mini has also lost the ability to play full HD 1080p videos though it can scale up to 1080i if your TV can support it. The device can play the same media formats the WD TV HD could aside from H.264/.MKV though it now supports RMVB formats. The interface while using the WD TV Mini is pretty straightforward and there’s not a lot to configure when you first use it. We were very pleased with the preview panel on the side when browsing through media files. The browsing does tend to slow down, however, when there are video files of 2GB and larger.

Priced at P3,300, the WD TV Mini makes for a fine travel companion for people who like to bring along their media libraries with them.

June 23, 2010

Western Digital, a manufacturer of external storage solutions, has rolled out the latest addition to its mobile drives line.

Designed with top-of-the-line notebook computers in mind, the WD Scorpio Black 500 GB SATA Hard Drive delivers the capacity and speed needed to supercharge a notebook without compromising battery life or quiet operation. This 7200 RPM, SATA 3 GB, high-capacity hard drive is also ideal for compact desktops, external hard drives, gaming systems, and blade servers.

By Melissa J. Perenson and Jon L. Jacobi
June 1, 2010

WHEN YOU’RE IN front of your PC, waiting for something to transfer to removable media, seconds can feel like minutes, and minutes like hours. And backups to USB 2.0 appear to crawl along at a snail’s pace—so much so that users often become reluctant to perform that essential chore. Such data-transfer scenarios are where the new Super -Speed USB 3.0 standard and its theoretical, blazing-fast through put of 5 gigabits per second—as promised by the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF)—will change your life for the better. And if our tests of four new USB 3.0 hard drives from Buffalo Technology, Iomega, Seagate, and Western Digital are indicative, the change will certainly be dramatic. USB 3.0’s impressive speed is its raison d’être, but part of its beauty is its backward compatibility

with USB 2.0. You need a new cable and a new host adapter (or one of the new motherboards built to support USB 3.0) to achieve USB 3.0 performance. But you can still use a USB 3.0 device on a USB 2.0 port and achieve typical USB 2.0 performance. You may also use USB 2.0 devices on a USB 3.0 port—though, again, with no gain in speed. The technology behind USB 3.0 more closely resembles PCI Express than USB 2.0. Backward compatibility comes from clever connec-tor design, and a dual bus.The designers added four data lines and a ground wire for the new USB 3.0 signals, and retained the existing pair of data lines for use with USB 2.0 devices. The two technologies share the existing power and ground wires, but they are otherwise completely separated. As such, the USB 3.0 connector has design changes to accommodate the extra data lines. If you examine the inside of a type A USB 3.0 port with its familiar rectangular shape closely, you’ll see that it shares the same size as a USB 2.0 port as well as the original four USB 1.1/2.0 contacts. However, the port also has an additional five smaller contacts for the new USB 3.0 lines. When you plug in a 2.0 connector, it uses the four original contacts; when you plug in a USB 3.0 connector, it taps into the other five. Because motherboards and PCs will ship with bothUSB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports, their insulating plastic, by specification (to distinguish them) must be bright blue on USB 3.0 ports, but black on USB 2.0 ports. Similar tricks have been used for the type B and mini connectors. Another potential benefit of USB 3.0: The spec calls for a mere one-third of the power consumption USB 2.0 uses. The creators achieved that by reducing some of the background maintenance requirements of USB; unlike before, with USB 3.0 the interface transmits data only to the link and device that need that info, which allows other attached devices to go into a low-power state when not needed. The change applies only to the USB bus, not to the power that USB peripherals require or use for their own operation— although getting things done faster ultimately means using less power, as well. The USB 3.0 revolution is coming, as many SuperSpeedUSB 3.0–certified products are now shipping, including host controllers, adapter cards, motherboards (from Asus, Gigabyte, Intel, and others), and hard drives. But it won’t be an immediate switch: According to In-Stat Research, it will be 2013 when more than one-quarter of USB products support SuperSpeed USB 3.0. That slow transition isn’t particularly surprising, considering that no compatible peripherals or consumerelectronics devices have even been announced so far. Some devices, such as keyboards and mice, won’t benefit from SuperSpeed USB’s increased performance.

Other products, such as digital cameras and camcorders, will; we anticipate seeing USB 3.0 start to appear on this class of devices sometime in 2011.

High Performance

The theoretical improvement in throughput that USB 3.0 offers is certainly dramatic—a 10X jump to 5 gbps over the existing USB 2.0 spec, which maxed out at a theoretical 480 mbps. But how does USB 3.0 fare in the real world? Pretty darn well, it turns out.

To determine the veracity of the USB-IF’s claims, we ran four SuperSpeed USB 3.0 drives through our test suite, which in cludes batch operations on a large set of small _ les, transfers of very large _ les, and a virus scan test that emphasizes a hard drive’s seek speed. Three models were 3.5-inch external desktop units: Buffalo’s $200 DriveStation USB 3.0 HD-HUX3, Iomega’s $240 eGo Desktop USB 3.0, and Western Digital’s $200 My Book 3.0. The fourth drive was Seagate’s $180, 2.5-inch, portable BlackArmor PS 110. Three drives came formatted in the NTFS file system, which is more efficient than the FAT32 file system in which the Buffalo drive was formatted. (FAT32’s only benefit is that both Macs and PCs can read and write to the drive.) Fortunately, Buffalo provides an option to reformat the drive as NTFS; we used it, and all of our test results reflect this. In PCWorld Labs tests, the drives assessed using USB 3.0 consistently proved noticeably faster than when using FireWire 800 (by as much as a third). And we found the USB 3.0 drives to be comparable in speed with eSATA drives (over a SATA-300 interface); the eSATA drives typically edged out the USB 3.0 units on a couple of our performance metrics. By comparison, USB 2.0 looked like a dog cart in the Kentucky Derby. Depending on the test, USB 3.0 proved to be up to 3.5 times as fast and always more than double USB 2.0’s speed. Of the three desktop-size models (each with a 3.5-inch hard drive inside), the Western Digital My Book 3.0 was fastest overall, with the Buffalo and Iomega drives _ noshing right behind it. The drives were separated by mere seconds on almost all of our read and write tests; we saw the greatest distinction on our malware scan test, with a span of 24 seconds between the fastest (Western Digital) and the slowest (Bu_ alo). Portable drives always lag their desktop counterparts in performance, simply because of their slower rpm (rotations per minute) speeds. As such, it’s no surprise that the portable Seagate BlackArmor PS 110 was not as fast as the desktop drives evaluated here. However, among the portable drives we’ve tested, this model leaped into second place; only the WiebeTech ToughTech XE Mini 500GB, tested over eSATA, bested Seagate’s USB 3.0 portable. In PCWorld Labs power consumption tests, we found that the average power draw at any given time for the USB 3.0 drives was slightly greater than that of USB 2.0 while data was transferring. However, since USB 3.0 does things far more quickly, multiply-ing the average draw over time shows it doing roughly twice the work per watt. Beyond performance measurements, USB 3.0 has a huge edge in convenience over eSATA. Unlike eSATA, USB 3.0 was designed with removable storage in mind. It’s hot-pluggable—you simply plug in a device, and your operating system quickly adds it to the list of available devices. By contrast, eSATA drives nearly always require a system reboot to appear. Furthermore, since USB 3.0 is a powered port, you don’t necessarily have to run another external power supply to the drive as you normally do with eSATA drives. Most 3.5-inch hard drives, however, require more power than the USB bus can deliver, and those models will still need AC adapters.

Certified USB 3.0

One of the things to look for when buying a USB 3.0 product is the certified SuperSpeed USB 3.0 logo—a label that will ensure that the product you’re purchasing truly lives up to the new specification. At this point, though, expect companies to release USB 3.0 products without official certification or the SuperSpeed logo. An example is the Buffalo Technology HD-HUX3, which was the first drive to market; La Cie’s drives, which are in the process of certification, will initially carry LaCie’s own logo for USB 3.0 (the company says it plans to put a sticker on the products’ box once certification is completed). One good thing: This time around, you won’t have to worry about whether you’re really getting the promised speeds. In the transition from USB 1.1 to USB 2.0, the creators of the latter spec wrote it in such a way that products didn’t have to communicate at the full 480 mbps in order to be called “USB 2.0.” In contrast, for a product to be certified as supporting USB 3.0, it must operate at the full 5 gbps.
Upgrade Possibilities
It’s easy to upgrade to USB 3.0 on the desktop: You can buy adapter cards on the aftermarket for approximately $30, pay extra for a card from Bu_ alo ($70), or choose the Western Digital drive that includes a card (which carries a $20 premium over the version of the drive sold without the card). With laptops, however, upgrading will be a tougher road. Unless your portable has an ExpressCard slot to accept an adapter such as the one that ships with the Seagate BlackArmor PS 110, you’re not going to be able to add USB 3.0 to the notebook that you have now. New laptops, though, will be a different story—eventually. So far only HP and Fujitsu have announced limited USB 3.0 support on laptops. Taiwanese laptop and desktop manufacturer MSI says it won’t have USB 3.0 until the third quarter of this year, at the earliest. Product managers for both laptop and desktop makers cite manufacturing concerns such as having chipsets available in large quantities, and the need to test USB 3.0 chipsets, as reasons for the delay.
The Final Word
Speed, backward compatibility, power consumption… USB 3.0 more than lives up to the hype. It’s only marginally slower than eSATA, and is far better suited to removable storage. eSATA may yet pull farther ahead, especially once external enclosures built with 6-gbps SATA (SATA-600) come to market. However, now that USB 3.0 is here, we wouldn’t be surprised to see eSATA lose traction to USB 3.0—at least in the general, non-high-performance consumer market. FireWire 800 is in a similar position: Aside from Mac support, FireWire 800 provides no tangible benefit over USB 3.0. In the end, the real question is, do you want to have the speed of USB 3.0? We certainly do.