 "Western Digital My Book 4 TB (WDBACW0040HBK) Review")
Western Digital’s My Book series has been around for some generations now, catering to users who want huge capacity but are not necessarily looking at portable drives. With the My Book 4TB drive WD offers a desktop drive with the maximum capacity available on a single drive.
Design and Build
The WD My Book 4 TB has a design which is quite similar to the previous generation WD desktop drives
Western Digital’s external desktop drives have had a constant design philosophy since many generations. The My Book is no different. It comes in a rectangular shape with the front having rounded edges with glossy black finish on the front and sides. The tiny white indicator light is present in the front. On the top and rear edge you have the ventilators for allowing heat to dissipate. On the rear side you only have the USB 3.0 interface along with the power port. There is a power button at the back which needs to be switched on for the drive to work. The build quality is good and we like the presence of rubber feet to give the drive a good grip when it’s standing. The USB 3.0 cable is of a considerable length allowing you to reach the USB 3.0 port on your back panel IO with ease if you so wish.
Features and Utility
The rear side of the drive shows the vents for heat dissipation and has the USB 3.0 interface and the power port
The My Book houses a 4TB Hitachi Deskstar 5K4000 drive. The drive has a single USB 3.0 interface. It gives the user an unformatted capacity of 3725.8 GB and comes pre-formatted for the Windows OS.
It bundles in the WD utilities which allow you to run diagonostics on your drive, secure erase the drive and so on. The SmartWare utility bundled with the drive allows you to backup data from your system to your drive based on the file type. You can schedule backups according to your convenience as well. The features and functionality are the same as is seen on other WD drives as well such as the WD My Passport Ultra .
Test Setup
Processor: Intel Core i7-4770K
Motherboard: ASRock Z87M Extreme4
RAM: 2 x 4GB GSkill RipjawsX
OS Drive: Intel SSD, 80GB
Source Drive: Kingston SSDNow, 120GB SSD
PSU: Cooler Master 800W Silent Pro Gold
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Performance
We connected the WD My Book drive to the the native USB 3.0 port on the ASRock Z87 Extreme4 board and ran our regular batch of synthetic and real-life benchmarks. The ATTO benchmark gave 136.49 MB/s for sequential reads and 137.89 MB/s for sequential writes. Crystal Disk Mark 3 gave slightly slower speeds as seen in the box below.
WD My Book 4TB Crystal Disk Mark scores
For the real world performance test, we transferred a 10GB single RAR file and a 10GB assorted file to get real life sequential and random file transfer speeds. To simulate a file write we transferred files from the Kingston source drive to the target WD My Book drive. We got around 102.4 MB/s for sequential write and 78.16 MB/s for assorted file write. After these tests we restarted the system to simulate a read test - transferring files from the WD My Passport Ultra drive to Kingston drive. Read speeds were comparatively faster at 104.48 MB/s for sequential reads and 78.16 MB/s for assorted reads. Internal transfer speeds were between 30-35 MB/s. Considering the My Book has a 5700RPM drive with a 24MB cache, the speeds are not the fastest.
Verdict and Price in India
The WD My Book 4TB drive is available for Rs 14,999 which gives us a cost per GB of Rs 4.02. Looking at the capacity this is an economical drive. Of course, the speeds aren’t the best considering it houses a 5700RPM drive. But then again, for someone looking to get this drive, speed should not be much of a concern as this drive will primarily be used as a backup drive and not for running applications or games from. It is an ideal drive for content creators, professionals as well as home users who have a huge media collection needing higher storage volumes.