Western Digital My Book Premium Edition WDG1C3200 Review

Overall Rating

Fast, quiet, reliable

None

I purchased two of the Western Digital My Book 320GB from Amazon.co.uk for £108 each for this price I received next day delivery. Also Western Digital are one of the biggest and most respected manufacturers of hard drives in the world, and most of the big PC manufacturers use Western Digital hard drives in their systems.

The main purpose of purchasing the Western Digital My Book 320GB drives was I wanted to store all my music in one place and with the drive been 320GB this would give me plenty of room for storage and the other I purchased was going to be used solely for keeping regular backups of my PC. In the box is a AC adaptor (this is to power the drive) a USB and Firewire cable, instruction manual, Western Digital My Book 320GB and a CD that contains software that includes backup software, this software will allow you to regularly keep a backup of your hard drives contents. The other software is a program called BUTTON MANAGER (this program is used to make use of the button and the lights that are shown on the from of the drive, I will mention these later in my review).

Connecting the drive to Windows XP is easy, you just connect the Firewire or USB cable into a free socket on your PC and then you plug the other end into the back of the drive, the computer will recognise the drive after a few seconds then after a further few seconds the installation will be completed (YOU WILL BE NOTIFIED BY AN ON SCREEN MESSAGE WHEN IT IS COMPLETE) If you have Windows 98 you will need to download the driver for the drive, this can be done by visiting Western Digital's web site and picking the appropriate driver.

The Western Digital My Book comes pre installed with the software I have mentioned but if needs be you can download it from Western Digital's web site. On the front of the Western Digital My Book, is a button, this button is used to safely switch on or off the Western Digital My Book but to make use out of this feature/button you must first install the BUTTON MANAGER software also when you have installed this software the inner circle light will start to indicate the remaining free space left on the hard drive. THE OUTER CIRCLE LIGHT INDICATES THAT THE DRIVE IS POWERED UP AND ALSO WHEN THE DRIVE IS BEEN WRITTEN TO OR READING THIS LIGHT WILL CIRCULATE.

One last thing, with this particular model you have the option of either connecting it to you computer via a USB connection or a Firewire connection, my experiance of this drives tells me that the Firewire is the faster of the two connection methods, don't get me wrong the drive is still very fast when connected via a USB connection but its that bit faster when connected via the Firewire, for example, I transfered a 4.2 GB folder from my PC on to this drive via USB and it took 3 min 42 secs, I then transfered the same folder but this time I transfered it via the Firewire and this time it took 2 min 30 secs, so you can see there is a bit of difference when you are transferring large files/folders etc.

On paper USB 2 looks the faster of the connection methods but Firewire has a faster sustainable speed, basically this means that, when you start to read/write something to this drive you will initially get a burst of high speed but after a few seconds this will drop down to a slower speed (sustained level) but Firewire has a faster sustained speed over USB 2. I thought I would point this out so as it may help someone along the way. Like I have said, if you choose to connect via USB 2 the drive is still very fast.

Well thats about all I can think of to write about this drive, I can highly recommend this drive, it is whisper quiet and very fast, I will list below the specifications of the drive.



Performance Specifications
Rotational Speed 7,200 RPM (nominal)
Average Latency 4.20 ms (nominal)

Seek Times
Read Seek Time 8.9 ms
Track-To-Track Seek Time 2.0 ms (average)

Serial Transfer Rate
FireWire 400
Serial Bus Transfer Rate (1394a) 400 Mbits/s (Max)

USB 2.0
Serial Bus Transfer Rate (USB 2.0) 480 Mbits/s (Max)


Physical Specifications
Formatted Capacity 500,107 MB
Capacity 500 GB
Interface Dual Interface


Physical Dimensions
English
Height 6.780 Inches (Max)
Length 5.630 Inches (Max)
Width 2.23 Inches (+/- 0.010 inch)
Weight 2.90 Pounds

Metric
Height 172.2 mm (Max)
Length 143 mm (Max)
Width 56.7 mm
Weight 1.32 kg


Environmental Specifications
Temperature (English)
Operating 41? F to 95? F
Non-operating -4? F to 149? F

Temperature (Metric)
Operating 5? C to 35? C
Non-operating -20? C to 65? C