The Ring of light activity left me quite confused. According to scant reviews I read about this device, the ring is meant to flash during disk accesses, yet mine just rotates in a circular fashion. Secondly according to the box and instructions, the inner ring (there are two) is meant to light itself up according to how much space remains on the drive itself. Now according to the Western Digital knowledge database I have to have a tiny WD Button Manager application running in the system tray, in order for the button to behave properly. Upon installing this application, I saw no difference in how the inner ring behaved.
After uploading 90GB of data to the drive, the ring did seem to be lighter and darker in places but it never gave much of a visual indication of how much space was left, it was never partially let alone half lit after almost packing it with data. The manual doesn’t even go into detail on how the ring behaves either, this should have been clarified, especially since you need a small application (on Windows anyway) running just make the ring apparently show how much free space there is.
The hard disk itself comes with some software on it, which I immediately deleted. Google Desktop was included (no thanks), as well as various PDF files, a small Western Digital Backup program and of course the Button manager. I am the type that prefers not to use automated one touch backup solutions - I’d rather do the job myself so I had no need for this anyway.
The sides and rear of the My Book is dotted with ventilation slots for cooling the 7200rpm hard drive that resides within. I thought the amount of slots was overkill but it does do a good job of keeping the unit warm to the touch. This unit can be stood either vertically or horizontally too, so you can stack multiple My Books together.
The rear of the My Book contains two Firewire ports, one USB port, an AC Adaptor socket and lastly Kensington Lock giving you security while the unit sits on your desktop.
Disk Performance
The My Book spins at 7200 RPM, and can utilize USB 2.0 or Firewire IE1394 interfaces. Firewire is my interface of choice in this case due to it having onboard controllers which don’t hit the CPU as hard as USB would. USB 2.0 can theoretically operate at 480 Mbits/s however it rarely even reaches this speed. Firewire 400 can sustain a solid 393 Mbits/s and felt extremely quick in comparison to USB. Upon checking the My Book’s properties, I saw that it was formatted with the somewhat now ancient FAT32 file system. I quickly formatted it to NTFS, which is better in many ways.
So we’ve got your average 7,200 RPM hard disk with an 8mb Cache running on either Firewire or a USB 2.0 interface. Let’s just see how these compare on my new PC. I’ve used version 3.0.1.0 of HD Tach to benchmark the drive with both interfaces. The PC had a clean reboot between each benchmark, and the long benchmark option was used.
As expected, Firewire came out trumps here giving me 43 MB/s, while the USB 2.0 interface managed just 35 MB/s.
With normal everyday use, the drive felt just like an internal hard disk, albeit one with a slightly slower transfer speed. I intend to use this drive to store private data as well as a lot digital photographs and MP3’s, which my Xbox 360’s can access and stream via its Media Center. So this drive is connected via Firewire to the PC, and the 360 is connected to the PC and able to access everything connected to the PC - just perfect!