WD My Book External USB 3.0 Hard Drive

The last Western Digital Mybook I had was a 1TB that my father handed down to me. He bought it in 2007 and it lasted until 2011. That is pretty amazing. Though I might add it was used as a backup drive for his mac. Regardless, the drive was always plugged in and would do 1 hour backups 24/7. So while massive amounts of data were not being transferred 24/7, the discs would be spinning constantly. I used his MyBook for my own mac. For my uses, I transferred movies onto it and filled it to capacity. We had a scare when it stopped working in 2010, and I decided to try taking out the hard drive from the enclosure and putting it in one of my hot-swappable external hard drive bays. Turns out the connection ports on the MyBook fried or the soldering just cracked and lost connection. So I always check now when a drive "dies" before drilling 1/4" holes into it and tossing it in the trash, to always test it in an external drive bay to see if it was bad/aging soldering first. To get a better idea of what an external bay is, here is the one I bought Plugable USB 3.0 SuperSpeed SATA III Lay-Flat Hard Drive Docking Station (ASMedia ASM1053E SATA III to USB Chipset, UASP and 6TB+ Drive Support). Anyway, from that moment on I've been a fan of WD and bought many an internal hard drives from them since. Now, this black friday I wanted to buy a huge capacity hard drive to store my uncompressed blu-ray movie libray in. First run though was going to be with my anime collection. I was torn between several factors: 1) should I go external or internal? * 5/10 years ago it made sense to buy a huge internal hard drive and put it into a docking bay for a fraction of the price of a portable drive. Portability (without a power supply) was a luxury few could afford. Now the portable drives are slightly cheaper than buying the bare bones hard drive and already include an enclosure! 2) If I went internal, WD offers several different drive types (Green, Blue, Red, Purple, Black, etc.). All with supposedly different features (durability, energy consumption, quietness, speed, etc.). Was it all bologna or was it a significant difference among each other? Would playback of my Hi Def movies be bottle-necked in any way if I chose the "wrong" drive type? 3) Of all external HDD size options (and constantly decreasing $/GB value) what size external hdd should I get? * With many external hdd prices, the higher the capacity, the less you will spend per gigabyte of storage space received (up to a certain point) 4) Of all the externals out there, should focus on value $/GB or brand reputation? Or a mixture of both? 5) Which externals seemed built to last/dissipate heat best? So all these questions plagued my mind for a good month, before the black friday deals kicked by butt into gear to take the plunge. I could buy a 5TB drive from Seagate that cost $129 - compared to a WD Mybook 3Tb for the same price. That's 2TB more!!! But...that's WD vs Seagate. Here are some things you should know that I read from many people's reviews. Firstly, Seagate gives you a warranty for your hard drive BUT only will replace your drive with a REFURBISHED hard drive. First of all, why do they have so many refurbished hard drives lying around? Exactly how reliable are those previously used drives? There's no carfax for hard drives. Would you buy a used car off craigslist with no history or record to entrust your life with? Then why would you entrust your valuable data, pictures and videos with a completely unknown used hard drive? Second, Seagate will charge you money to have their technicians look and try to restore your hard drive. Or they will charge you for software that will try to restore bad sectors of the hard drive. Does not sound like much of a warranty to me. I'll share a personal experience with you. I have a roommate who bought some big capacity Seagate external drives for his anime. The hard drive failed after 10 months and 3TB of data he had were lost because the policy with Seagate is: return the unopened/unaltered drive to use for a refurb or possible recovery of the drive. I told my friend to let me take the drive out and put it into my docking bay to see if its a soldering issue or if the drive is indeed dead. He elected to use Seagate's warranty and lost his info. FYI, NEVER give your hard drive to anyone. Whether they be Apple, Seagate, WD, etc. If it has files on it that you would never consider posting to the world wide web, don't let it leave your home. The right people can copy select information faster than someone at a restaurant can copy your credit card info and buy something from Willie's Hubcaps LLC. in Jamaica, NY! Just don't do it. Anyway, it happened to the refurb hard drive he received and after that, he went WD. I know I'm bashing Seagate right now, but I'm not completely endorsing WD either. I have a Seagate 320Gb portable since 2010 that is running to this day. But it is the model that is comparable to WD's passport series. So it's not a high capacity drive. I have seen many poor reviews for both Seagate and Western Digital so you cannot simply go for review counts alone. To be honest, the best drives I've used are the Hitachi drives in macbooks. They have lasted me almost a decade in every mac I've bought and I run them hard. But have not found a high capacity Hitachi for prices that I can get from WD or Seagate, so I have to go with one of the popular guys. I am supporting WD because every. single. drive I've bought from them has served me 3-6 years and I have not been displeased in the least. Every hard drive has a lifetime. And I buy new hard drives to replace the aging ones. Just a part of life. So with that said, my personal recommendation is to steer clear of Seagate if anything for their warranty policy and customer service. I'd choose a Toshiba over them. But I digress. After all the headache of comparing WD internals vs externals, etc. etc. I pulled the trigger on the 2TB capacity. 1TB you're just losing money. 6Tb you're paying also way too much. 2TB-4TB is the sweet spot for the WD MyBooks. *** As of 12/05/14, the price of the 2TB drive is $96.99. I DO NOT suggest buying this at the current price. Yes, it's a good price compared to 5 years ago, but I paid $89 for mine. Besides, the WD Elements Portable 2Tb drive is $87 (I personally don't like the WD Elements line though, stay away). I'll let you in on a well known secret, the price of storage in the 2000s was $14-9/GB. In 2005, $1.15/GB. In 2010, $.07/GB. Now, it's about $.03/GB. Pennies on the dollar. It will continue to decrease. There is NO REASON (short of an emergency drive failing on you) that you should buy an external drive between Black Friday and Christmas. Wait for the holidays and then take advantage of the deals. Most of all, during Black Friday the hard drive I got was not even a featured deal! It wasn't even advertised widely as some other products on amazon. So I'm lead to believe $89 is the best/most accurate price you can get the 2TB WD MyBook for. By Christmas I'll wager it decreases to $75. Anyway, this drive performs very very quietly. It does not get hot. Transfers are about 25MB/s when connected to my usb 2.0 computer. But I know they will be faster when connected to a usb 3.0 port. It runs on mac and windows without installing any additional software. I would not recommend installing the software that it comes with unless you want to use it exclusively as a backup drive to your main computer. If you have mac, all you need is time machine (don't install anything). Regardless of OS, install the universal firmware updater. Firmware updates are good for hardware and you should make it a habit of checking for updates released periodically. For windows, install the WD Smartware. For some reason, when plugging into my Win 7, it does not show me an option to eject the external drive. So I downloaded and installed the WD Smartware and when the program opens, I right-click on the picture of the WD MyBook and then can select eject. But only within that program. You do not want to yank out the cable or shut down the computer and yank it out. You always should find a way to specifically tell the computer to stop communicating with the device and eject it. **** Tips I always use for Storage Mediums ****** Once you get your WD MyBook, I highly recommend reformatting it before you install anything. Reformat it to exFAT. This way you can OPEN and SAVE files of ANY SIZE onto the hard drive whether you are plugged into a mac or windows computer! I never thought I'd use windows until I had to and I was in deep doo doo. Better to be safe than sorry. Fat32 is universal too but means you cannot save files larger than 4GB. NTSC means you can OPEN files on your mac but can't save to them while you can OPEN and SAVE files while on windows. It's technical I know. Sorry. On Windows, choose an allocation unit size depending on your use for the hard drive. **Allocation size can be confusing but I'll try to explain it as clear as I can: Imagine you are moving to a new house. The condition: 1) Everything you own must be packaged in a box of the same size. The sizes are iPod, Teddy Bear, Bicycle, Refrigerator, and Grand Piano. You can choose only one of these. 2) No matter how big (or small), it must be disassembled to fit inside those boxes 3) Each box can only have ONE item in it You have a nearly unlimited supply of boxes. Let's say you choose iPod-size boxes. All your small items will be able to fit snugly in each box. But bigger things like your grand piano would have to be chopped up into so many pieces that it may take 20,000 of these boxes alone to package the musical instrument! While each box is filled to the fullest, you will have to unpack 20,000+ boxes when you get home! Let's say you choose Grand Piano-size boxes. Your piano can fit in it and utilize 100% of the box, but what about your salt shaker, iphod, shoes, and basil plant? They will each require their own box- the size of a grand piano!! You will have less boxes to unpack but have only 5% of the box utilized. So unless you live in a piano warehouse or ipod factory, you will something in between. The Bicycle Boxes for packing. It is a happy medium between better space management and less boxes to unpack when you get home. I live in the piano warehouse (I save 50GB movie files only!) So I choose the LARGEST allocation size possible. If you just want to backup your computer, you have 1 grand piano and 1 ipod, among other things. You choose MIDDLE-OF-THE-ROAD size. If you transfer only your photos & music, word documents, and other tiny files, you live in an iPod Factory! You want the SMALLEST allocation size possible. I have a mac but I run Win7 via bootcamp. So I formatted by WD MyBook to exFAT. On the same windows I selected an "allocation size" of the largest possible size allowable (for the capacity of the external hard drive). I forgot what I chose, but if you are on Windows, then select the option at the very top. The further down you go, I believe the size [of the imaginary boxes] will get bigger. Overall this drive is quiet, does not make weird noises, and stays cool to the touch all the time. Those Seagate externals are extremely flawed design wise. The new line they released offers improved airflow, however the vents are at the bottom of the external enlosure! Heat travels upward, the vents should be on top! (Like this product) The Seagate Backup Plus 5TB Desktop External Hard Drive with Mobile Device Backup USB 3.0 (STDT5000100) not only has a bad airflow design but the corners are extremely sharp many reviewers are saying (keep away if you have children and animals in the house?).