Western Digital 1TB home or essential edition

[Flaco]

Hi friends,
I am planning to buy a new external hard drive, I have selected the two models of Western Digital. first one is Western Digital My Book II Essential Edition 1 To USB 2.0 and second one is a home edition.


I am confused. please help me

[deoWo]

Hi,

let me tell you something. The performances are not at all the same. The Home is FireWire and eSATA, two protocols that are faster than USB. The ride has eSATA 3 Gbps, as fast as an internal HDD, while the USB was not traveling in peak 480 mbps. The eSATA is definitely the fastest protocol for external HDDs.

[Killen]

eSATA provides perhaps a braket with. Perhaps that also provide in WD. it is always better than USB. but if you want to know about the eSATA, it is the first case the two is the same thing except the connectors.

[tloffman]

On Tom's Hardware web site there is a comparison chart of hard drives measuring throughput. The WD My Book rates much slower than the Seagate FreeAgent Extreme. The Seagate Extreme 1TB was selling at Fry's Electronics a few days ago for $129. I bought a 1TB WD at Costco three weeks ago for $149, so I should have purchased the Seagate.

After purchasing the WD I bought a eSATA PCI-Express board and eSATA cable. I was unable to get XP to "see" the WD drive. I then returned the board and bought another one - same result. For some reason my Dell Inspiron running XP will not recognize the WD external drive.

I AM running the WD drive with Firewire 400 cable and it works fine. The USB 2.0 will NOT work because of XP limitations on external drive size. I found this out last year. I had been using a 160gb WD external drive and it worked fine with USB 2.0, but I bought a 500gb WD My Book external drive and USB 2.0 would NOT work with it. So, I had to buy a firewire PCI-Express card and the supplied Firewire 400 cable (came with the WD) worked fine.

My attempt to speed up operations with the eSATA connection has failed so far. Since I have tried two separate eSATA boards and each uses different drivers, I suspect there is some connectivity problem with the WD drive. So, if you're going to go eSATA I would suggest you try the Seagate. I have no idea if the Seagate will work with the eSATA connection, but if it does I would like to know about it. I would happy return the WD My Book and get the Seagate Extreme to make the connection work.

The eSATA connection specs say it can achieve 3.0gb/sec, but in actuality it will only do 2.5gb - but that's OK since it's 5x faster than the Firewire 400. A nice comparison table can be found on Wikipedia.com under eSATA.