WD's backup/restore software is actually useful

It’s been a long time since we reviewed a USB external drive—not since November 2008, to be exact—mostly because they’re essentially commodities now. With transfers capped at USB 2.0 speeds and drive sizes mostly standardized, portable hard drives have had few features by which to distinguish themselves from their peers—the usefulness of included software, eSATA support, and full-disk encryption among them. On the eve of USB 3.0 drives, the Western Digital My Book Elite 2TB seems to be the state of the USB 2.0 drive art, with a custom e-ink display. But is it more than a gimmick?

The My Book Elite shares the vaguely book-like formfactor of the My Book World and Essential lineups, but along its “spine” is the e-ink display, which shows a custom 12-character drive label, a capacity meter, and a little lock icon if you’ve enabled disk encryption. Despite its limited usefulness, we dig it—mostly because we geek out over any applications with e-ink.

Backup, restore, disk encryption, power options, and changing the display label are all handled by WD’s SmartWare software, which mounts from a virtual CD partition on the My Book. Backup is intuitive, though not very fine-grained, and files can be restored either to their original locations or to a restore folder on your computer. The drive can also be set to back up continuously when the drive is plugged in.

The My Book Elite’s transfer speeds, as expected, are constrained by its USB 2.0 connector—no FireWire or eSATA here. Strangely, the average write speed was lower than either a bare WD Caviar Green drive in an external cradle or the 500GB SimpleTech ReDrive, at about 20MB/s compared to the others’ nearly 30MB/s writes.

The My Book Elite is reasonably priced, powerful, and intuitive, and although power-users will lament its lack of eSATA and opt for their own backup software, the drive offers users easy backup and restore, full-disk encryption, and an unnecessary but awesome e-ink label.

In the future, an increasing number of hard drives will be writing data in 4KB chunks (rather than 512 bytes) to increase storage capacities. Performance isn’t impacted, as long as you follow some rules.

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HDDs, The Next Generation: Drives With 4KB Sectors On The Way

A TDK chart paves the road to 3 TB hard drives by November.

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Harddrives to Hit 3TB Capacities By November

A TDK chart paves the road to 3 TB hard drives by November.

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Harddrives to Hit 3TB Capacities By November

We wouldn’t normally test two products from the same lineup in two consecutive issues of the magazine. But when Western Digital’s My Book 3.0 showed up just days after the March issue went to print (it's on newsstands now!), we knew we had to review it. It doesn’t have an e-label or capacity meter, like the My Book Elite. Nor does it include WD’s SmartWare backup software or hardware encryption. But the My Book 3.0 has one feature that makes it awesome: USB 3.0.

Oh, sweet mercy, yes.

The My Book 3.0 is, like its predecessors, a simple black shell, vaguely book-shaped, surrounding a 3.5-inch Caviar Green drive. It comes in four variations: 1TB or 2TB, and with or without a PCI-E 2.0 adapter card. The x1 PCI-E 2.0 card gives you two USB 3.0 SuperSpeed ports and is based on NEC’s PD720200 chipset. It’s worth noting that using an x1 PCI-E 2.0 slot limits the theoretical throughput of the USB 3.0 ports. USB 3.0’s maximum theoretical throughput per port is 5Gb/s, or 640MB/s, while a x1 PCI-E 2.0’s throughput is 500MB/s. But honestly, you’re unlikely to see any hard drive or SSD saturate USB 3.0 at this point.

We tested the My Book 3.0 on the same rig we used to test last month’s My Book Elite—an Asus P7P55D-based system running a 2.66GHz Core i5-750. For reference, we also tested the same drive in a USB 2.0 slot. In our standard HDTach full-drive variable-zone benchmark, the My Book 3.0’s average read speed was 88MB/s, with average writes of 66MB/s. By contrast, both the My Book 3.0 and My Book Elite, when connected to a USB 2.0 port on the motherboard, averaged around 31MB/s reads and 26MB/s writes.

USB 3.0 is just beginning to show up in consumer devices, including a few high-end motherboards, but most of the peripherals that employ the technology so far are external hard drives, which benefit most from the bandwidth upgrade.

The Western Digital My Book 3.0 probably won’t be the fastest USB 3.0 hard drive we test this year, simply because it’s one of the first. It’s absolutely no-frills; it doesn’t even come with backup software. But it’s fast and capacious, is first out of the gate, and brings affordable USB 3.0 to the masses—which puts the bottleneck back at the drive access speed where it belongs. That counts for a lot.

(Note: Our full review of the My Book Elite will be posted onlined soon.)

Finally, Seagate's 7,200rpm 2TB drive

When Seagate told us it would be shipping the first 6Gb/s SATA hard drive, we were a little surprised. And when we found out it wasn’t going to be a solid state drive, but a 7,200rpm Barracuda drive, our skepticism increased. Sure, we’d been waiting a long time for Seagate’s 2TB 7,200rpm drive, and it’s nice to see the SATA 6Gb/s spec ship on a real-world product, but putting a 6Gb/s controller on a mechanical hard drive is like putting a Formula 1 airfoil on a golf cart. The vehicle just ain’t ever going to go fast enough to warrant the accessory.
 
In order to test the Barracuda XT on a level playing field, we built a new rig: a 2.66GHz Core i5-750 and 4GB of DDR3 RAM on an Asus P7P55D-Premium motherboard, which has an onboard Marvell SATA 6Gb/s controller as well as an Intel 3Gb/s SATA controller. The rig runs Windows XP SP3 and 64-bit Vista Home Premium from a 300GB WD Raptor. We tested both the Barracuda and its closest competitor, the 2TB WD Caviar Black, on both the Marvell and Intel controllers.

The SATA 6Gb/s! It does (almost) nothing!

On the Marvell controller, the Barracuda reached average sustained read speeds of 108.3MB/s and average sustained writes of 102.3MB/s—only slightly faster than on the Intel controller. Random access times were within a few fractions of a millisecond on both controllers, averaging 14ms for random reads and 7ms for random writes, though reads were faster on the Intel controller and writes were faster on the Marvell. Strangely, burst transfer rates on the Marvell controller were nearly 30MB/s slower than on the Intel—186MB/s versus 214MB/s.

We saw the same pattern when we tested the WD Caviar Black 2TB on the Marvell and Intel controllers—random reads were faster on the Marvell, and random writes on the Intel, and burst speeds were significantly higher on the 3Gb/s controller. But this time the drive’s average sustained write speeds took a huge hit—from 112MB/s on the 3Gb/s Intel controller to 99MB/s on the 6Gb/s Marvell controller.

Though we give Seagate props for being the first hard drive manufacturer to include a 6Gb/s SATA interface, it’s of questionable utility—the technology just isn’t mature enough to warrant inclusion on a mechanical hard drive. The Barracuda XT’s performance on a 3Gb/s SATA controller rivals the Kick Ass 1TB Barracuda 7200.12, though it’s much more expensive. So don’t sweat it if you don’t have a board with 6Gb/s SATA yet (and who does?). However, the WD Caviar Black has higher average sustained transfer rates, lower random access times, and a higher burst transfer rate, so it remains our champion high-capacity drive.

There are two good reasons for a hard drive upgrade. Reason one: hard drives have become faster and cheaper per gigabyte

Excerpt from:
Do You Need A New Hard Drive With Your Windows 7 Upgrade?

Portable hard drives are great backup targets. But should you use the ubiquitous Windows utility, a higher-end tool, or a brainless, consumer-friendly solution

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Managing Backup: Three Software Solutions Compared

SLC makes a comeback

It’s been a long time since we tested a single-level cell (SLC) SSD, as the market has moved almost entirely over to multi-level cell (MLC) designs. MLC is favored because it’s cheaper to produce and each cell can store two bits of data, rather than one, so you can cram more storage into each flash unit. On the other hand, SLC is faster and is rated for 100,000 read/write cycles, as opposed to 10,000 for MLC. Naturally, SLC is preferred for enterprise solutions, while MLC has captured the consumer market. But with the introduction of the (relatively) affordable Agility EX series, OCZ is hoping to win back some of the consumer market for SLC.

The OCZ Agility EX is billed as an affordable SLC drive for consumers. Affordable, of course, is relative.

The 60GB Agility EX pairs the popular Indilinx Barefoot controller—responsible for this generation’s blazing-fast, stutter-free SSDs—with 64GB of onboard SLC NAND. It’s worth noting that this is the same capacity as a standard 64GB SSD; OCZ just uses a binary naming convention. In our tests, the Agility EX’s sustained read speeds topped off at around 197MB/s, or approximately six percent slower than the second-gen Intel X-25M. Sustained write speeds, at 175MB/s, were the same as with the Patriot Torqx, an MLC drive using the same Indilinx controller. But the Agility really shone in application tests, with a five percent faster Premiere Pro encoding time and a 13 percent higher PCMark Vantage HDD score than the Torqx.

At $400, the Agility EX is twice as expensive as 64GB MLC drives using the same architecture. But its performance is right up there with the best we’ve ever tested. The fact that its life span is 10 times that of an MLC drive is attractive, to be sure, but seems unnecessary for consumers—after all, how many of you are still using 10-year-old hard drives? The Agility EX is a great drive, but SLC life spans (and SLC prices) may just be overkill, even for enthusiasts.

Data Robotics is refreshing its excellent line of Drobo automated external hard drive enclosures. The Silicon Valley startup is launching the Drobo S and DroboElite. The Drobo S is similar to the standard Drobo but offers a fifth drive bay, allowing up to two drives to fail with no data loss. The new ‘S’ version also packs a faster ARM chip and an eSATA port to go along with the FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 ports. Users can enable dual drive redundancy via the software control panel.

The DroboElite is intended for enterprise use. It has room for 8 SATA drives, much like the older DroboPro. The Elite now comes equipped with two gigabit Ethernet ports as the only connection method. You won’t find any iSCSI or FireWire like on the Pro. There is however, a USB port intended for device management, not everyday use. The DroboElite is definitely not something for consumers to go pick up.

The new units are shipping now. The Drobo S is going for $799 and the DroboElite for $3,499. The standard Drobo will continue to be sold for $399.