Upon starting the 1TB test the estimate states 2 hours and 10 minutes to finish and that certainly gives me plenty of time to do the text while we let it simmer.
This storage powerhouse from Western Digital sports the signature Apple metal sheen that they always use on products from them bearing “Studio”. Unlike the Version II which they place a mystical glowing indicator up front, this has a simple flashing LED to indicate reading and writing state.
It’s very silent and inconspicuous in its operation that I can hardly feel any vibration from the mounted drive that is currently spinning to accommodate the full terrabyte of data that I’m feeding it at the moment.
Like a CPU, all the connections are behind the MBS which creates a very pleasant appearance when looking at it straight on.
Temperature dispersion seems to be working well as there is no radiant heat emanating from the top even when I place my palm up against it.. of course its been running for only a short while right now but with adequate ventilation like this there shouldnt be much heat that will stay within the enclosure.
One thing that differentiates this package from WD’s other products is the longer USB 3.0 cable which as you can see above allows me to place the drive on the other side of the desk (away from the notebook vents) and still operate it from that side with a USB 3 connection.
Being a “Studio” product, it is originally formatted for the Mac hence Windows can only see it initially through the Disk Management utility from where you would be able to format it as well.
As an initial test I transfered a 2+ hour movie into the newly formatted drive to see just how quickly it gets thru withing regular operation and it didnt disappoint – a little over 20 seconds if you are to believe the text spouted by the Windows UI but it certainly felt much faster than that.
And so now I am testing it with a simple utility that creates virtual data to test the consistency of the read and write for storage devices with which I first threw in a gigabyte of data which is already above the general filesize for daily operations:
Warning: Only 1000 of 3815212 MByte tested.
Test finished without errors.
You can now delete the test files *.h2w or verify them again.
Writing speed: 130 MByte/s
Reading speed: 130 MByte/s
H2testw v1.4 Transferred in 7 seconds
I followed it up with 10 gigabytes which is representative of a high bitrate high definition movie encode:
Warning: Only 10000 of 3815212 MByte tested.
Test finished without errors.
You can now delete the test files *.h2w or verify them again.
Writing speed: 128 MByte/s
Reading speed: 129 MByte/s
H2testw v1.4 Transferred in 1 minute 18 seconds
Neat right? This possibly means that transferring data from a full SDXC card around 64GBs wont take 8 minutes and that is saying something, especially when you’re using it at location in a work environment.
Now I’m running a 1TB test to see if the USB 3.0 full rate holds up. It appears to drop a megabyte or so after extended periods of transfer and 2 hours at this speed seems already like an eternity.
It is certainly advantageous to have one of these especially if it compliments your existing hardware… like this:
Of course there is also the My Book Live which is preformatted in NTFS unlike this one. If you’re looking for something even faster then there is the Thunderbolt edition as well but it has yet to achieve the wide application that the USB 3.0 standard has right now especially with ultrabooks.
Having an external storage of 4TB’s in todays media environment sure seems plenty… but that is what we said about the gigabyte when 32MB cards were what powered digital cameras. It certainly would feel nice to put every bit of data I have currently into it but a minor accident might just whisk it all away faster than a snap of a finger (or two), of course if you take enough precaution then there isn’t a need to worry.
The consistent performance of the hard drive that they paired with the aluminum enclosure holds up to USB 3.0 speeds consistently and it is that level of confidence that makes it an essential tool for keeping precious data as well as finding it fast, efficiently, and most especially… with style!
Thus far, over 300 gigabytes have been successfully written while I was composing the review… if only recovery worked at a similar rate XD
And so the test ends almost 4 hours and 30 minutes in for both read and write sequences
Here’s an unboxing video for better reference and an idea of what you’ll get with the purchase:
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