WD "My Book" - hard drive questions

[Wulfman]

Hi everybody,

I was looking into buying an external hdd in the terabyte range lately. I was either thinking about buying a samsung F1 or a WD RE2 drive separately with a generic usb2/esata enclosure, or ..well.. a complete product.

If I remember recent discussion correctly, there are some "my book"-users around here. Can you check which drive is used in there? If there is a (low power) RE2 drive built in, I wouldn't need to spend more money on the DIY-solution.

thanks,
wulfman

[DJ]

Having bought a few (four) 500GB models I cannot recommend them. Bought a ESATA version which di not work properly in SATA mode. They seem to have problems with jmcron onboard controllers. USB mode work though. A USB only version that I bought crapped out within 2 months. Have two others which are Mybook Studio edition. Works well under ESATA but under firewire 400 keeps dropping out. Just disappears from my computer and under disc management. Haven't tried firewire 800. You are probably better off getting an enclosure and bare drives.

[High_Jumbllama]

I have the 350GB My Book Premium Edition - USB2/Firewire. It has worked well for me with one annoying problem. Older version(s) of the button manager would end up using ~100% system resources. The drivers from the site seem to have fixed it.

[Jammrock]

It's better to buy a good enclosure and add a hard drive(s) of your choice. The name brand devices usually use really crappy chipset with poor speed and performance.

[Tjalfe]

So what chipset / enclosure should you look for these days for good performance?

[High_Jumbllama]

My device mentioned above will vary between 30MB (5.63GB, 1285 files) to 50MB (Using a ~6GB ISO) per second which is of course faster with fewer large files. This is using the firewire connection over a FireWire 800 3-Port PCIe from Siig. USB seemed similar but the processor was not under any other significant load.

Whatever your interface type is, make sure you have a good interface card/chipset. Using PCI-Express is a must when using either an integrated or add-on interface.

[UtwigMU]

There was a regular SATA WD drive in the one that has fallen from some desk and I opened up. The problem with external enclosures is that quality is mostly shit, so is the cooling, etc... Books are OK and cheap, white ones, the network edition can only be accessed through network and offer some backup software, though I still prefer cheapo fileserver: big case, cheap motherboard with lots of sata ports, Matrox Millennium PCI, lowend CPU (a bit of higher end if you want to run other servers, VMWare...) and then you just stick in a big drive when you run out of space. Once you have ~4 drives you can consolidate them by purchasing 3 equal drives and setting some kind of software or hardware RAID5. If you don't need uptime it's a bit expensive to have this on 24/7.

If you want to just move data arround opt for 2.5" enclosures, laptop drives are cheap enough and you don't need power adapter since you can power them from USB. Dealer price for 1TB MyBook without VAT is 198 Euros, 320GB 2.5" passport is 142 Euros. Difference between 500GB WD and generic is 15 Euros.

[Jammrock]

So what chipset / enclosure should you look for these days for good performance?

I currently use a Thecus, and I like it, but the case design lacks very much. It is USB or eSATA and does 2 drive RAID 1 or 0. I get 8 MB/s sustained over USB 2.0 and 34-37 MB/s sustained over eSATA.

https://www.thecus.com

MacAlly makes some good ones. Fast, sturdy and quiet:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=+40000092&Configurator=&Subcategory=-1&description=mcally&Ntk=&srchInDesc=

http://www.macally.com/EN/Product/?BigClassName=Drive%20Enclosures

Thermaltake does some decent enclosures too.

You want to look for, if you can figure it out, a Silicon Image eSATA controller and an Oxford USB controller (I think they do Firewire too). Silicon Image is the best known eSATA/SATA name, and Oxford makes the fastest USB chips around from what I hear.

[Wulfman]

I get 8 MB/s sustained over USB 2.0

shouldn't that be more like 20 or 30MB/s?

mfg
wulfman

[High_Jumbllama]

Something wrong with that setup if you are only getting 8MB/s.

What Antivirus? What processor?

[Claymonkey]

avoid the iomega drives. A client bought the 1TB model that is two drives that can be Raid 0 or 1. It worked fine in Windows but Acronis would NOT touch play with it well. It would see it and then freeze the system when it tried to push or pull an image from it. FYI Acronis normally is nix based on boot discs so nix might be more annoyed with bad chipsets. I tried it as a 1TB NTFS and Fat32 drive. I would have tried it in Acronis safe mode since that's WinPE based but then you don't get usb support... thus you can't see it.

Anyway, the point of all that is I haven't felt good about Iomega since the Click of Deaths started happening and every product after the Zip100/Jaz1gb have been flawed.

I agree with the opions of some of the others and suggest getting a well rated enclosure and rolling your own. This is where Newegg's review section comes in handy even if you can't order from there.

[Jammrock]

shouldn't that be more like 20 or 30MB/s?

mfg
wulfman

That's what you would think, but I've never used a USB drive that got anywhere near those speeds. I use my Thecus almost exclusively in eSATA mode, so I don't really care.

[Jammrock]

Something wrong with that setup if you are only getting 8MB/s.

What Antivirus? What processor?

NOD32, Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 (2 GHz, Merom core). The 8 MB/s was from an older external HDD I was using. I haven't tested the Thecus on USB.

[High_Jumbllama]

Hmm. Older crappy external HD/casing would explain it. I ask Antivirus on reflex. Norton has wronged me so many different places that I work.

[Wulfman]

That's what you would think, but I've never used a USB drive that got anywhere near those speeds. I use my Thecus almost exclusively in eSATA mode, so I don't really care.

I have a freecom hdd with lan & usb2.0, and while lan usually gives me about 7MB/s as expected, usb2.0 is more in the mid-20MB/s range. tested both on a crappy add-in usb2.0 card as well as on the thinkpad.

anyway, for rolling my own - any comments on the western digital RE2 1000gb? from what I've seen, it uses (far) less power than others & runs cooler, performance is mid-range, which should be more than good enough for an external drive.

mfg
wulfman