Review: 8TB Western Digital My Book External USB 3.0 Hard Drive

Time to start backing up all those years worth of photos and home videos. Maybe even take some backups of your computer’s main OS drive and protect everything using a dependable external hard drive. Western Digital is one of the top-performing companies when it comes to this and their 8TB external My Book hard drive that released earlier in the year is a great pick because it is always better to have “too much” space than not enough. Then again, is there really such thing as “too much”?

This My Book packs the perfect amount of space for modern setups that give you all of the room for those capacity-hungry backups. Even better, use it to dump all of your movies and music on so that you can use it as network-attached storage and access it throughout the house using all sorts of devices such as other computers, mobile devices, and gaming consoles.

The drive itself is surrounded by your typical plastic enclosure than all external drives come in. There are some metal features inside to help spread some heat along with a fan and offer onboard encryption to help add a little security to the mix. The enclosure converts the drive from SATA to USB 3.0 from the back. There are also rubber feet on the bottom to keep it from sliding around (mostly to protect the surface it sits on from scratches or wear). On the back, where the data and power cables go, there is a small hole for a device lock (most commonly used on laptops). This is more for if the drive is on display somewhere or you’re afraid of theft for any reason.

So nothing new on the design of things. Weight on the other hand, you can feel that extra space burning a little extra heaviness to the drive compared to a 3TB drive we had sitting next to it during tests. Since the drive will most likely be sitting around in the same space for a long time, this shouldn’t be a concern for anyone.

It does get a little warm during heavy use, but this is common and we have seen much worse with external HDDs. However, let’s talk more about performance!

This isn’t an SSD. So you can’t expect speeds that are going to lift you off the ground with gratitude, but you do have USB 3.0 and it lives up to the speeds seen with these drives over the last few years. We used Acronis True Image to backup a 320GB drive (included 2 partitions, one of which was the Windows C:/ drive), complete with boot sectors and all. The source drive was your average 5400RPM HDD and the entire process took just over three hours.

Average transfer for general copying of data from one drive to the next resulted in around 80-170MBps on average depending on small files, larger files, and groups of each. Pretty much average there, but not bad at all. So the main focus for this drive is capacity more than anything. Again, this would be a great drive to use as your media drive on your network.

Ripping it apart, there is an HGST drive inside (model WD80EZZX), 5400RPM 3.5″ drive. Western Digital bought HGST (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) back in 2012, combing the two companies’ technologies together.

You get everything you need inside the box. The drive, power cable, and USB. The drive comes with Acronis True Image WD Edition software which gives you a need for making system and file backups with, including scheduled maintenance.

Our Conclusion

This is a great drive for large capacity needs. Perfect for system backups and media storage for large media libraries. With USB 3.0, you get the same speeds you’d expect from an internal SATA drive within its 5400RPM category. However, if you are looking for a high-performance drive with better transfer speeds, then maybe a 7200RPM drive is more your flavor (ie, Seagate’s internal 8TB 7200rpm drive, or even better, their 10TB model…which is a little pricey right now though). Western Digital’s external drive is priced around $249, which isn’t too bad compared to the competing models. You will probably see it drop down a little by this time next year.

Our Rating 8 / 10

Average Price* $249.00

*Average price is based on the time this article was published

Specifications:

• Up to 8 TB capacity
• USB 3.0
• WD Backup software
• Acronis True Image WD Edition system level backup
• Password protection and hardware encryption

Are you a manufacturer or distributor that would like us to test something out for review? Contact us and we can let you know where to send the product and we will try it out.