Let’s admit it, we always need a lot of extra space for our precious files, may it be music, movies or whatever files we shouldn’t be curious of. So if you are looking for a large capacity hard drive, Western Digital has released the My Book External Drive, so let’s see if this baby will be a top choice for you in choosing an essential data storage.

The My Book comes with different capacities: 2 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB (the Mac version only has the 2 TB and 3 TB variants), all of them are running on USB 3.0 and the external drive is still compatible with the old USB 2.0

From the first look of the My Book, it’s obviously inspired to look like a hardbound book (its size is around 6.7 by 1.9 by 5.5 inch), , which makes it look neat on your desktop thanks to its simple design, though the glossy cover finish would  attract a lot of fingerprint marks on it. It has vents on the top and back portion for a better air ventilation so you don’t need to worry about the My Book from overheating. It has a single LED which blinks when it’s reading or transferring files and goes steady when idle.

The external hard drives requires its own power supply to run since it has a high storage capacity, the power adapter has no issues on what kind of power outlet you have thanks to the wide range of replaceable power plugs.

We conducted some tests on the My Book with the CrystalDiskMark disk benchmark software to check out the My Book’s performance, we conducted nine consecutive tests on a 4 GB file. Based on the results, the reading and writing speed is really impressive especially on sequential reading and writing.

We also made some tests of transferring actual single large files to the My Book are we are pleased to see that it managed to transfer a 4 GB video file in a matter of 40 seconds, we even tried transferring a large batch of videos (more than 8,000 videos summing up a total of 200 GB) to the My Book and we were surprised that it managed to transfer it around 40 minutes.

Included in the My Book are a couple of utility software  for the external drive, these include the WD Smartware, Drive Utilities and Security. The Smartware has neat features such as analyzing your drives to sort out images, music and videos as well as setting the external drive as a backup, you can even sync your Dropbox account for a more convenient file managing. The other software lets you secure your precious data and diagnose your external drive for any issues such as bad sectors.

To sum everything up, the WD My Book is a must have for any PC or laptop users that require a large plug and play storage, with a great speed performance on transferring or reading files and helpful utilities that are included on the package for back ups and secure files, minor drawback would be the additional power adapter but it is understandable for its storage size. So if you are looking for a large capacity external drives, go for the My Book which is already available in the market.