If we were dating the Western Digital My Book Home Edition, the sordid, brief affair would quickly end with one of those “it’s not you, it’s me” conversations. This 1TB enclosure is like the girl (or guy) who keeps calling and texting and e-mailing and IMing and calling and texting again—every time you connect the device to your PC, you get the same annoying application installation window over and over and over.
And of the available applications, we can’t find a single winner: The My Book Home uses a custom-branded, bodily-fluid-poor Memeo backup application as the default and sole option for file preservation. You get a trial version of Memeo AutoSync as well–the same program with a dabbling of encryption. Rounding out the list is Google Spam, er, software—just what you always thought was missing from an external storage device: Picasa, Google Desktop, and a freakin’ toolbar.
A small delight, however, does await you. The My Book Home performs a little better than expected on our eSATA tests. USB and FireWire average read speeds lagged behind those of numerous other drives we’ve tested, including sluggers like Seagate’s FreeAgent Pro and tykes like Toshiba’s Portable External Hard Drive. It’s a tough trade-off to accept, given the slow rate of eSATA adoption.
One drive hosts the terabyte of storage on the My Book Home Edition, making it slower than its RAID'd companions.
www.wdc.com
Quiet as a dead mouse, redesigned status indicator far more elegant than the previous big blue circle.
USB and FireWire speeds are quite slower than expected. Junky included software.
| BENCHMARKS | ||||
| Connection | eSATA | USB | Firewire 400 | |
| Burst (MB/s) | 97.1 | 25 | 42.9 | |
| Random Access (ms) | 15.7 | 15.5 | 17.6 | |
| Average Read (MB/s) | 56.6 | 23.9 | 34.9 | |
| Best scores are bolded in each connection category. All benchmarks taken using HD Tach 3.0.1.0 | ||||
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