western digital wdbacw0010hbk my book essential 1tb

#Western digital wdbacw0010hbk my book essential 1tb install
#Western digital wdbacw0010hbk my book essential 1tb windows

I plan on using it as a simple redundant back up drive to hide away in my fire protected safe for 6 month intervals, and for this purpose the drive is great. Small file transfers were somewhat slower, which is normally the case in storage tests – 26MB/s writes and 45MB/s read speeds, which is about average for a drive this size.Īfter testing the drive with SMART tests and disk check, I successfully copied a mirrored backup of 6,972 files, or 910.62GB of the 931.48GB available from another 1TB drive in my PC. The USB3.0 interface definitely made this drive faster than other USB 2.0 drives, or when plugged into a USB2.0 port, as it achieved 82MB/s writes and 95MB/s reads in large file transfer tests, which is in the top performing desktop hard disks that I’ve looked at. The drive inside has a variable spin speed set during manufacturing to offer the best balance between temperature and power use, but it can mean that performance may vary from disk to disk.

#Western digital wdbacw0010hbk my book essential 1tb windows

When I plugged this drive into my USB 3.0 port, Windows 7(64bit) instantly recognized it as “WD My Book 1140 USB Device” and made it available for use. But that’s fine, the main objective was to retrieve the SATA HDD within this enclosure and that was successful.Pros: I like the 6 foot power cable that came with this drive, which is a foot longer than normal. Like the light pipe, I doubt I would be able to find a use for these pieces elsewhere. This assembly was mounted inside the external case with some very custom shaped pieces of rubber for vibration isolation. Another neat feature visible here is a power button, a feature I don’t often see on external drives. On the upside, this rigidly fastened metal reinforcement meant the USB3 port is the strongest I’ve seen by far. This board was rigidly fastened to the drive with two screws, including this one that took me an embarrassingly long time to find. It was quite stoutly attached! On the other two drives, once the internals were exposed I could easily pull the drive loose from the adapter board.

#Western digital wdbacw0010hbk my book essential 1tb install

My goal is to remove the bright green board to expose the bare drive’s SATA interface so I could install it in my TrueNAS server. The duller green board is the actual hard drive controller circuit, the brighter green board is the USB3 adapter board converting it to an external drive. I was a little sad to see that, because its precision fixed curvature means there’s almost no chance I can find a way to reuse it. It might look like a flexible piece of clear plastic in the picture but it is actually rigid. To carry its light to the front façade, there’s an intricately curved light pipe. Like the other two drives, there’s a surface mounted indicator LED on the circuit board. There is no cooling fan, and none was expected. I was also happy to see that the cooling vents on this drive was more likely to be useful than the other two, since the drive is actually exposed to the airflow and it is designed to stand on its edge so warm air can naturally escape by convection. I thought it was a creative way to approach the problem. The geometry was confusing to me at first, but following the seams (and releasing clips) made it clear this enclosure was made of two C-shaped pieces that are orthogonal to each other. (Not all of the clips survived the process.) Like the other two drives, this one lacked external fasteners and had to be taken apart by prying at its seams to release plastic clips. Which does not support USB external drives, so I am removing the bare drive within for its SATA connection.

Now it will serve that role again, sort of, by becoming part of my fault-tolerant ZFS RAIDZ2 storage array running under TrueNAS. The third and final drive to be disassembled in this work session was used for a similar purpose: the Windows Backup tool that (as far as I can recall) was introduced in Windows 8. It was the second of three external drives under two terabytes that I had gathering dust. I took apart an external USB 2.0 hard drive I had formerly used for MacOS Time Machine, but haven’t touched in years.