Western Digital My Book 8TB and My Passport 4TB External HDDs Review

Miscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks

There are a multitude of options targeting the same market segment when it comes to DAS units with single hard drives. As we saw in the performance evaluation section, there is really not much to differentiate between the various options in the same product class when it comes to the usage patterns of the average consumer. Most consumers would do well to choose the cheapest model at the time of purchase. In order to escape this rut of being a commodity, manufacturers have started to offer value additions to their DAS products. For example, Seagate bundles a backup application, cloud storage (200GB of OneDrive for two years) and the Lyve photo management app along with their DAS units. Western Digital also adopts a similar value-add strategy. We have the WD Backup application that can help keep a continuous backup of certain folders in a PC on the DAS unit.

Western Digital also includes a utility program and a security configuration program. The utility helps the users to run disk checks, configure the drive spin down time interval, turn off the LED (for the My Passport model) and secure erase the drive. The security program allows users to set a password for accessing the drive, with the option to unlock the drive for the current Windows account and do related management tasks.

Note that this password activates the AES-256 hardware encryption block on the drive (the encryption is in the drive, rather than the USB bridge chip) for both models. We ran CrystalDiskMark with an encrypted drive and found that there was no performance loss due to the activation of the security features.

Coming to the business end of the review, the new My Book 8TB model retains the price of the earlier model - $250. This is much cheaper than the $349 of the Seagate Innov8, but priced around $35 more than the Seagate Backup Plus 8TB that comes with 200GB of cloud storage for two years. However, to WD's advantage, it does sport a helium drive with consistent performance compared to the Archive HDD used in the offerings from Seagate. The My Passport 4TB pricing follows a similar trend. At $139, it is around $20 more than the Seagate Backup Plus Portable 4TB drive which comes with 200GB of cloud storage for two years. This drive is PMR-based and (Update - 10/21/2016: The ST4000LM016 uses platters that operate partly in PMR mode and partly in SMR, along with multi-tier caching (MTC) which includes DRAM and flash - The efficiency of MTC ensures that an empty drive maintains as much consistency as a PMR drive even under heavy traffic.) offers performance similar to the My Passport 4TB. That said, both the My Book 8TB and the My Passport 4TB offers hardware encryption, which might be worth the premium over 200GB of cloud storage for two years offered by the Seagate models for some users. Other than these aspects, there is little to differentiate the products from Seagate and Western Digital in this space. Consumers can choose either vendor / model depending on their requirements.