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Page 1 of 2  Western Digital’s range of external hard drives have been doing extremely well in the market recently, today we look at the new range, the My Book Premium ES Edition, ES for eSATA! It’s about time these were released.
The Western Digital My Books are a range of rather simplistic external hard drives generally used for backing up files from a home/office PC or for bulk, semi-portable file storage. The My Book Premium ES Edition continues this tradition of functional simplicity, but rather than continuing to rely on the slow transfer rate of USB2.0 or even Firewire 800 (let’s face it, when transferring 500GB of data, even Firewire 800 is slow) they’ve finally got a drive that supports the eSATA connection standard, making the maximum available transfer rate a whopping 3 Gigabits Per Second!! This comes with a price premium of only AU$30 over the base edition My Book, the ‘Essential Edition’, and the same price as the non-eSATA(ES) Premium Edition My Books. The model we’re having a look at today, the 500GB version, sells online for around AU$290.00. Western Digital 500GB My Book Premium ES Edition  The unit itself has an attractive semi-gloss charcoal plastic appearance which is broken up only by the blue power/activity LEDs on the front of the unit, which surround the power button. Unlike the 1TB My Book Pro Edition II we reviewed a few weeks ago which has 2 internal hard drives in a RAID configuration, this model is a lot simpler with only one internal hard drive, which also makes it about half the physical size and weight. Drive Lights  There is no active cooling with this model, instead just a lot of perforated plastic at the top, back and base which allows air to circulate freely through the drive and does a surprisingly good job of keeping the whole unit nice and cool. We had the drive running for a whole day, constantly working with a burn-in test program and afterwards the drive case was only slightly warm, not in any danger of overheating at all. A cool drive will help reduce the risk of failure, and with up to 500GB of data being stored on a single drive, a failure is the last thing you’d want.
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