Our good buddies in Western Digital has sent us again a unit for testing, and this time around it’s a drive that was preformatted for Mac: the WD My Book for Mac. This externally-powered HD lugs around 3.0 TB of writeable space, with a USB 3.0 interface for you to read and write faster for you. The USB 3.0 port is also USB 2.0 compatible, so you should not worry about drive readability.

Box Contents

What you see in the box once opened.

The Box contains your standard USB 3.0 cord and adapter. It also contains a secondary male plug versions to change with so you can be sure to be able to plug the drive in an outlet that has no 3-prongs.

The contents laid out. From left to right: Adapter, 3-Prong Plug, 2x Two-Prong flat Plug, USB 3.0 Plug. Below are the Literature leaflet inserts for product specification, care and caution. Blue Stapler not included, only for size comparison :p

Connecting the HD with the Mac is pretty straightforward, with the USB 3.0 plug.

WD My Book for Mac 3TB USB 3.0 back view and USB 3.0

Unfortunately my Mac Mini version doesn’t have a USB 3.0 port, so we’ll have to settle in with the USB 2.0 speed for now.

My Mac Mini: Too many wires and a hard drive.

Once connected, we can now see its properties.

Connected and ready to write

The drive’s properties confirm the size:

System specifications as seen in the properties dialogue.

The writeable space seems to be seen as 3TB. Hopefully this is 100% accurate as we’ve seen some drives formatted space smaller than the raw capacity (due to file table properties).

Inside the drive, we have a .dmg file containing the standard app suite of WD for their drives.

It provides utilities such as a a drive check, security lock and a status check. You can also perform a quick drive check to see if there are problems on the disk.

 We then downloaded the BlackMagic Design drive speed tester from the App Store to run read/write tests on the drive.

Let me remind you that this is for the USB 2.0 PORT.

Even with the USB 2.0 speed, I was able to view HD movies well and edit video files straight from the drive on Adobe After Effects CC.

Conclusion

Overall, this drive is a solid bonus for those who love to keep their downloaded movie files or store their video materials for editing. It also totally works well for people with any Mac. Despite the shortages of the USB 3.0 port in my unit it was also compatible in its file transfers; it didn’t lag or it didn’t need any special driver. And since this is an external enclosure, all I can think of for its downside is that we hope there’s a smaller and a more compact version of this drive to carry around in a laptop bag. Totally not for highly-mobile people.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.