This drive was bought on the recommendation of a member here. Good call.
It arrived Thursday morning and was put to immediate use. Kid in a candy store sort of thing going on.
First thing I did notice was the case was well vented. I had been reading reviews off Newegg that stated the box was not vented and overheating was leading to failure.
It has vents that run the length of the two short sides and half way down the back. The bottom half of the back is where the USB port, power, and power switch reside. On the front, which is rounded, is the power/activity LED. It's a subdued small diameter white LED. It's black, shiny, and finger prints like crazy. A good tack cloth might be a handy to have around to get the smudges off with out making the smooth surface slippery.
After getting it connected I fired it up and my system including the Eset protection package recognized it right away. I acknowledged it to the protection package and passed on have it scan it as it was brand new. The Win7 OS asked what I wanted to do and I selected open files.
The only thing that is on the drive of value when it's new is the WD formatter and the back up software. The manual come on it but there's a printed copy in the box. I copied those off to my internal data drive for safe keeping.
This is my first taste of USB 3.0 and I was eager to see if it lived up to the hype. Of course the speed of the drive was getting factored in so it was going to be how fast it is over all.
Like I said in another thread I have 300 or so gigs of anime series and this was chosen to be the test files. Opened the internal data drive and then the folder where the source files where chosen. Select all and drag over to the external drive. Before letting go of the mouse button I noted the time, 11:36am. I let go of the button and it was off to the races. The window popped up with source and target info as well as total size of files being moved. It also gives an estimate of the time it would take to move all the files, 30 minutes.
One by one I watched the files copy over to the target drive while keeping an eye on the speed of the session. Here's the good part.
Keeping in mind that the data is having to come off the drive, go through the USB 3.0 port from the computer, go to the USB 3.0 port on the external drive, get translated in to SATA format, then wrote to the drive, it did pretty good. Top speed was 90MB per second while the slowest was 75MB.
Finish time was 12:13pm.
I have always been suspicious of posts where the person is saying that the transfer rate is so slow or dropped down during the transfer. I'm of the thought that it's got to do with the data you're pushing from one drive to another. I have seen movies and my anime going pretty fast at first then dropping like a rock. However I was pretty impressed by the fairly consistent speed on this media transfer. But I did want to put my theory to the test.
Next to get moved were a little over 10,000 pieces of anime artwork. Total source file size, around 200 gigs. I didn't clock this run although I should have.
I created a folder on the target drive and opened it up. Going back to the source files I did a select all and dragged them over to the target folder.
I let go of the mouse button and once again it was off to the races.
The window opened up and it got busy. The estimated time to completion was 20 minutes. The speed started out at 120MB for the high while there was a 10 second or so dip down to 77MB then back up to 118MB where it stayed rock solid for the rest of the transfer. Noting the 100 gig difference in the total transfer sizes, I wasn't concerned about total time just the transfer speed.
That was two different types of data being transferred with two different sets of speed. Over all I think that puts some credence in my theory. But then it could be just a fluke. But after running my little experiment it does appear to have to do something with what's getting pushed from one drive to another.
After running this experiment I went in to the drive manager and partitioned off the 3TB drive in to 3 logical drives at 931GB each. That's after partitioning, formatting, and other overhead.
I copied the back up software to each of the logical drives and much to my disappointment, it refused to run. Kept telling me it wasn't being run from the external drive. Oh poop... So if you partition off the drive and put the software back on it doesn't work? Hmmm Note to self: Ask what the frack happened at WD tech support. I'll let you know how that comes out later.
I set the 3 drives up as X, Y, and Z. To get my OS drive backed up I resorted to the Windows backup system. It goes to the Z drive every morning at 3:00am. The rest I do manually.
So far, so good. The bang for the buck ratio appears to be very good.
Western Digital My Book Essential 3TB Desktop External Hard Drive - Newegg.com
You can have one of your own currently for $139.00usd.
It arrived Thursday morning and was put to immediate use. Kid in a candy store sort of thing going on.
First thing I did notice was the case was well vented. I had been reading reviews off Newegg that stated the box was not vented and overheating was leading to failure.
It has vents that run the length of the two short sides and half way down the back. The bottom half of the back is where the USB port, power, and power switch reside. On the front, which is rounded, is the power/activity LED. It's a subdued small diameter white LED. It's black, shiny, and finger prints like crazy. A good tack cloth might be a handy to have around to get the smudges off with out making the smooth surface slippery.
After getting it connected I fired it up and my system including the Eset protection package recognized it right away. I acknowledged it to the protection package and passed on have it scan it as it was brand new. The Win7 OS asked what I wanted to do and I selected open files.
The only thing that is on the drive of value when it's new is the WD formatter and the back up software. The manual come on it but there's a printed copy in the box. I copied those off to my internal data drive for safe keeping.
This is my first taste of USB 3.0 and I was eager to see if it lived up to the hype. Of course the speed of the drive was getting factored in so it was going to be how fast it is over all.
Like I said in another thread I have 300 or so gigs of anime series and this was chosen to be the test files. Opened the internal data drive and then the folder where the source files where chosen. Select all and drag over to the external drive. Before letting go of the mouse button I noted the time, 11:36am. I let go of the button and it was off to the races. The window popped up with source and target info as well as total size of files being moved. It also gives an estimate of the time it would take to move all the files, 30 minutes.
One by one I watched the files copy over to the target drive while keeping an eye on the speed of the session. Here's the good part.
Keeping in mind that the data is having to come off the drive, go through the USB 3.0 port from the computer, go to the USB 3.0 port on the external drive, get translated in to SATA format, then wrote to the drive, it did pretty good. Top speed was 90MB per second while the slowest was 75MB.
Finish time was 12:13pm.
I have always been suspicious of posts where the person is saying that the transfer rate is so slow or dropped down during the transfer. I'm of the thought that it's got to do with the data you're pushing from one drive to another. I have seen movies and my anime going pretty fast at first then dropping like a rock. However I was pretty impressed by the fairly consistent speed on this media transfer. But I did want to put my theory to the test.
Next to get moved were a little over 10,000 pieces of anime artwork. Total source file size, around 200 gigs. I didn't clock this run although I should have.
I created a folder on the target drive and opened it up. Going back to the source files I did a select all and dragged them over to the target folder.
I let go of the mouse button and once again it was off to the races.
The window opened up and it got busy. The estimated time to completion was 20 minutes. The speed started out at 120MB for the high while there was a 10 second or so dip down to 77MB then back up to 118MB where it stayed rock solid for the rest of the transfer. Noting the 100 gig difference in the total transfer sizes, I wasn't concerned about total time just the transfer speed.
That was two different types of data being transferred with two different sets of speed. Over all I think that puts some credence in my theory. But then it could be just a fluke. But after running my little experiment it does appear to have to do something with what's getting pushed from one drive to another.
After running this experiment I went in to the drive manager and partitioned off the 3TB drive in to 3 logical drives at 931GB each. That's after partitioning, formatting, and other overhead.
I copied the back up software to each of the logical drives and much to my disappointment, it refused to run. Kept telling me it wasn't being run from the external drive. Oh poop... So if you partition off the drive and put the software back on it doesn't work? Hmmm Note to self: Ask what the frack happened at WD tech support. I'll let you know how that comes out later.
I set the 3 drives up as X, Y, and Z. To get my OS drive backed up I resorted to the Windows backup system. It goes to the Z drive every morning at 3:00am. The rest I do manually.
So far, so good. The bang for the buck ratio appears to be very good.
Western Digital My Book Essential 3TB Desktop External Hard Drive - Newegg.com
You can have one of your own currently for $139.00usd.
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