WD 2TB Elements external HDD

WD 2TB Elements external HDD.

I recently purchased a 2TB WD Elements external HDD for backing up media and what-not that was chewing up room on my PCs intenal HDD.

This was the third WD drive that I have bought (not including the WD Green internal 750GB drive in my PC). The previous two were 1TB each and but they are completely different models. The first one is housed in a metal casing with rubber ends that raise the shell above the desk surface regardless of which way you place it down. The connector is a large square USB type on the drive end of the wire and standard USB on the other. It's quite noisy and vibrates a lot. There is a bright blue (in colour, not intensity) activity LED on the back where the plugs go in. It's possible to open the case and get to the drive but I believe the drive and small circuit board are keyed to each other so salvaging is not possible with this product, other than moving the drive to an internal location within a standard PC.

The next drive has an all plastic enclosure and small rubber feet on the bottom to stop it vibrating against the desk surface. It's a lot lighter than the first drive and is silent, even when writing and reading data. It has a white LED for activity. The connector is the smaller micro-USB type often found on compact digital cameras.

The latest drive looks identical to the second drive and only differs in the model name on the sticker on the bottom. You can't really tell which is which is you have them side-by-side. The latest drive is actually noisier than the 1TB version but not nearly as noisy as the very first drive. I also think the two newer drives are the slowest rotating of the three. This is fine as the USB 2.0 interface is the limiting factor with these devices.

All three devices stack quite easily and there are no odd shapes to contend with.

I bought the 2TB drive to house media files which had become too large for the 1TB drive. The older 1TB drive holds system backups and old archive data which don't require so much space.

The Good:
- Price. The new drive cost AU$114 which is less than the $140 I paid for the first drive and only $15 more for double the capacity of the second drive. At the moment, the 2TB drive is on sale at Officeworks and various other retailers for $99. That kind of price is ridiculous considering the amount of space you get.

- Support. The power adapter on my first drive blew up when I plugged it into a friend's power outlet. The drive wasn't plugged in at the time so it didn't suffer any damage. A quick bit of researching on the net showed that this particular power brick was prone to failure and a short stint on the WD support website, and a couple of tech emails later and another power adapter was on it's way to me in the mail. As far as component support and warranty dealings are concerned this has been the best experience I have had with a company, including all face-to-face conversations with retail stores. WD didn't even bother asking for the old brick back.

- Stealth. Apart from the writing and reading noise when the disk is running, the drive is quite unassuming sitting next to my monitor. The black plastic case blends into the rest of the desktop equipment and the activity light is quite muted when pointed at the wall.

- Convenience. Having 2TB spare area at the flick of a switch (or plug of a ...plug), is very nice, especially if you need to move large amounts of data a far distance.

The bad:
- Noise. The latest drive has a gurgling noise as the read/head moves back and forth. It's very low frequency so not too annoying but as the previous drive was virtually silent, it makes you wonder about the longevity of the drive components.

- Bland. The black plastic case, while sleek, is quite boring. If you want something fancy looking to go with your fancy case you are better off with an aftermarket external drive case.

- Powered. These drives require power. Some say this is a good thing as you will never be caught out by an unpowered USB as you are sometimes with USB powered drives. I would have to agree with this view, but the opposing view is that you now have to carry around a power brick wherever the drive goes. I would argue that that is what USB key drives are for. Anything this large and you should really be seated somewhere where there is power. Still, I will put this as a negative since extra weight and equipment isn't really ideal.

- Default FAT32. These drives are preformatted to FAT32 which is fine for all Windows operating systems and Linux flavours but Mac may need some extra preparation. The problem with FAT32 is that files over 4GB will not be able to be stored on the drive out of the box, so you can forget about storing DVD ROM images unless you reformat to NTFS (or similar). This will lose you a few hundred MB of storage due to NTFS overhead, and it may take a while to perform the reformat. It also may limit the flexibility of operating systems that can read the drive. The worst part about this is if you want to store over 4GB and only realise AFTER copying heaps of data across already. I learned this the hard way.

- Slow. These drives are slow. The bottleneck is the USB2.0 interface but the drives themselves are slow by nature. When USB3.0 models come out expect a decent price hike to go with the hike in performance.

- Always on. If you want to leave the drive plugged in, the power brick will consume power even when the drive is powered down. I always unplug the data cable first which puts the drive into power down mode, then I unplug the power cable at BOTH ends. I always plug the power brick into the wall first before attaching to the drive. If something fails and the power spikes, at least it wont take the data with it.

- Seagate drive spins faster. The Seagate version of this drive spins at 7200rpm so it might have better raw performance. It's been stated though the WD drives have smarter hardware and firmware that make performance comparable, even though the drive spins closer to 5400rpm. For the average user, you won't see any noticable difference by going to a faster spindle speed, other than less money in your pocket after the purchase.

Conclusion:
- With SSDs becoming more popular, mass storage magnetic drive will only drop in price. The price is so low right now already that these drives are perfect for backing up systems and storing infrequently used files. They work great as a secondary cheap photo storage box for dSLR images captured in the RAW format.

Score: 7.5/10