WD My Book Essential 3.0 2 TB External Hard Drive (USB 3.0/2.0)

I decided to pick up the new Western Digital 3tb drives with the new usb 3 interface before the Vat rise.
Initial inpressions of the drive is that it is the exact same size as the previous Mybook. However, the difference is the new usb3 cable going into the drive has a flat head. Also the drive for the first time for along time comes with a u.k power plug. No more swapping out and clicking in the u.k plug for the european one or finding the u.k plug connector missing.
The drive i received was stated as been made in Thailand. The connectors were in line and the power on button though in the same place felt more soild clicking in. Hopefully the poor quality control of the drives in the old usb2 Mybook drives has been fixed with these new drives.

On powering on the drive a single light comes on which is alot less distracting then the previous drives.
The drive has Smartware software on the drive but is not installed completely you must initiate it if it does not autorun.(Smartware is for backups, content gauge and password data protection. You can choose to install only the data password protection in the options separately without the other parts of the software if you want. The smartware sofware for Windows and Mac also includes a control to change the sleep time of the drive hibernation times which will be useful those who don't like the drive sleeping to quickly when idle.)
I use these Western Digital Green Drives for data storage backup for video, music and photos. So i did not install this. However you must click and install this software first, even if you don't want the software. It will give you the option to uninstall smartware on initalisation and will install the SES driver. You will need this otherwise if you format the drive, your windows operating system on reboot may search for the missing driver. If you forget to do this and it can't find the drive. You can manually install it. Make sure you back up the software somewhere else before formating the drive. (the driver is in the extras folder.)

If you wish to format the drive there is a quick format exe file on the drive. On initiating it, it will give you the option to factory format or format with XP compatibility. This is important for XP users because drives over 2.1 tb will not work via plug and play on a XP computer. If you format it with XP mode it will change the block size so it will work.
This drive is compatible with Macs and the software is similar to the Windows one. It also has a turbo mode that can be installed in addition to improve speed of the drive on the Mac. I am unsure if this makes a difference without it.

On testing of transfering a 1.89gb video file on USB2 (Windows 7) i got approximately 30MB/S on USB3 i got approximately 89MB/S for the same file. These speeds may vary on different specification systems.
However, you can see even on my system speeds are at least 3 times faster on USB3.

In conclusion if you have need for a large 3tb (real size 2.72tb) storage drive this is the drive to get. Its quiet, low powered and stays cool. An alternative to this drive is the Seagate 3tb Goflex external drive which is prone to overheating problems and is not recommended.Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 3TB Desktop USB 2.0 External Hard Drive with Capacity Gauge
Please note this drive is not recommended for gamers, graphics 3d users or photoshop editing or even for a boot up drive due to its low speed and power. It is however perfect for a secondary storage drive and has the bonus of been future proof due to usb3.
p.s I will post reliability of the drive after more use. (update drive still working 030212)

I purchased this product to consolidate my 2TB+ collection of media into one place. As a hard drive the unit functions well although seek times are a little longer than I would prefer after it wakes up from sleep. It does not whizz like an SSD but then this product is about storage not speed. There is a capacity versus speed trade off at this time regardless of what you buy.

There is backup software included with the drive if you want to use it. The drive was recognised by both XP and Windows 7 immediately and it runs cool. I had it on for a couple of days copying my collection over and there was no heat to speak of.

The only problem is that the unit is not silent. I have it sat next to a silent Shuttle XS35GT PC with an SSD and the My Book is noticeable. Not offensively noisy by any means but noticeable. It goes to sleep fairly quickly if you do not need it and then you have silence. Using the included management software you can set the inactive time to sleep mode. I have it set at 10 minutes which is the minimum.

Great product and I only wish I had some USB 3.0 hardware that would really let me take advantage of it.

I am using this on a newly built PC with USB 3 interface. It was easy to set up and is very fast BUT so far I have only managed to use it with Windows backup software. The hard drive on my PC is split into two partitions which are configured with the Windows system and all other programs on C:// and all user documents on F://. WDSmartware analyses the C:// drive correctly and finds a few files of the type it can backup. When I select the F:// drive, however, it claims that all 21 GB consists of "System Files". It does not analyse them and so does not back them up. So far I haven't found a way round this. If WDSmartware worked I would have given it 5 stars.