Western Digital Elements 1TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive – Black

Quiet, cool and unobtrusive, 22 Nov 2009

By 

A. Hopkinson –

  

I bought this hard disk primarily for use with Apple Time Machine from two Mac laptops – a Macbook and a Macbook Pro. The drive comes formatted for Windows but a reformat only took a few seconds. Usable space on the drive is 931.5GB – I have the drive partitioned, 600GB for Time Machine and 330GB for general usage.

The drive is very smart, with a textured top and glossy sides and has rubber feet. Both connectors (power and usb) are at the back, next to a white activity light, so there’s nothing flashing at the front. The power lead is fairly compact (compared to my Lacie FA Porsche drive), with the transformer built in to the plug rather than halfway along the lead. Even the USB cable is well designed, with moulded easy-grip ends.

The drive is almost completely silent and runs very cool despite having no fan. I’ve probably moved about 1TB on and off it over the last 24 hours and it’s never even been warm. Transfer speeds seem to be around 1GB/minute for both large files (a 200GB SuperDuper sparseimage) and many small files (my 50GB iTunes library), which is about standard for a USB hard disk as far as other reviews say. This equates to about 130Mb/s – USB is apparently capable of 480Mb/s, but I’ve never seen those speeds.

The drive has a two year warranty in the UK/Europe, which I think is the same as other drives in the WD range (although the My Book Elite has 3 years).

All in, for a budget external drive this is a great buy with solid build and performance to match any decent USB drive.

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 Comments (15)

Neat little drive, 16 July 2010

I brought 2 of these recently to increase my storage as I have a load of ripped dvd’s, HD and music content. My previous drive was a Samsung story 1.5tb external drive which I’d filled.

These drive came pre formatted for windows(can’t remember if they were FAT32 or NTFS). Either way I’m using a Mac so had to format them before use. Formatting was easy and quick with OS X ‘s disc utility .

What I’m doing now is adding content to the 1st drive and using Carbon Copy Cloner to backup onto the 2nd drive on a schedule.I’ve moved all the stuff I’m not so bothered about/probably wont watch again onto the old Samsung drive and disconnected it.

These drives are very neat, look great stacked and are near silent when running. There’s no power button on them so power down when not in use, this would be the only negative I could find as there is a slight delay if they have powered down and you access them again. Not a deal breaker for me but you should know about it. The Samsung has a power switch on front to turn it on, I suppose this has it advantages in terms of no 3 second delay on access after a period of inactivity but I guess the Samsung uses more power if its spinning more.

Transfer times are as expected from a USB drive It was an overnight transfer for 1.4TB of mixed data MP3’s, MKV’s and MP4’s.

I have my Mac streaming from the 1st drive to a WDTV Live via home plugs, HD streams with no network issues whatsoever, I even streamed from drive 1 to WDTV while it was transferring a data backup to drive 2 simultaneously.

Hope this helps

Regards

Greg

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 Comments (5)