Western Digital My Book Essential 2 TB

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Caractéristiques
Capacity	2 TB
Format	3.5 inches
Interface	USB 2.0
Rotation Speed	N.C.
Cache	N.C.
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Write Speed	N.C.
Read Speed	60 MBps
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Alexandre Botella
Test date: March 4, 2010

Software suite

Western Digital supplies WD SmartWare with its My Book Essential. This allows you to check on the health of your external hard drive and synchronise your files.

It may look superb with simple handling but the the choice of backups is fairly limited. It's impossible for example to synchronise a single video or photo, you have to carry out the operation across all files of the same type. A poor choice and very impractical.

Western Digital is one of the biggies in terms of external storage and is back with the My Book Essential, an external drive in models from 500 GB to 2 TB, which is the one we tested.

The casing is in glossy plastic. Not without charm, it gets dirty easily and picks up finger marks. The connectivity is minimal, consisting of USB 2.0 only. There would have been ample space to integrate e-SATA, handy for transfers over 10 GB.
To come back to the casing, although in plastic the MyBook Essential is well made with an excellent finish. You'll be proud to have one on your desk!

Write speeds disappointing

WD My Book Essential 2 TB

WD My Book Studio Edition

USB 2.0 speeds in MB/s

We're a little diappointed with the My Book Essential. Read speeds are fine but writes are poor. It takes almost a minute to write 1 GB of data to the drive and 35 seconds to retrieve it.

Low energy consumption

Although its speeds aren't up to expectations, it is a nice surprise to find an external hard drive with such low energy consumption. In idle, it doesn't go over 3 watts and while copying this only goes up to around 8 watts.

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Pluses

Low energy consumption

Impeccable finish

Minuses

Access time: 22 ms

Low write speeds