WD's My Book External USB 3.0 Drive Joins 3TB Club

3TB hard drives aren't exclusive to Seagate now as Western Digital has just announced its own to join none other than the My Book Essential external drive family. The WD's 3TB - a Caviar Green drive - is based on a 4-platter so the drive actually has 750GB per platter compared with 600GB per platter for the Seagate version. Whether or not this will have an impact on performance remains to be seen. The WD's My Book Essential also comes with a special MBR hack to allow device to report 4k clusters to Windows XP as the OS wouldn't be able to handle drives past 2.2TB.

Also unlike the Seagate GoFlex modular adapter approach, the WD's My Book goes with a single USB 3.0 connection. The company actually touts the external drive as having two interfaces - Hi-Speed and SuperSpeed USB. The drive can hit a max. 150MB/s transfer rate. In the software department, the WD My Book ships with SmartWare for automatic and continuous backup. Expect only software encryption from this size champion. The 3TB WD My Book is already on its way to retail shelves for a price tag of $249.99.

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