Features:
Western Digital’s My Book Essential 3TB drive, was the first 3TB external drive when it launched. It houses the WD30EZRS which is the 3TB internal WD Caviar Green drive having a 64MB of cache and rotational speeds between 5400 – 7200RPM. The main feature of the drive apart from it being a USB 3.0 drive lies in its utility – WD SmartWare. The drive comes bundled with this utility and it allows you to password protect your data and backup important files. On installation of the software, it will scan your system and segregate the data into System, Pictures, Music, Movies, Documents and Others. You get to see this is a graphical manner with each category represented by a colour code. Later you can backup entire categories or pick and choose folders, the next time you connect your drive and Run Backup.

Design and Build
It looks like any other My Book Essential drive with the bulky form factory. The glossy black plastic surface has a rounded finish in the front with an activity indicator. The top, read and lower portion are covered with ventilation vents to keep the drive cool while in operation. The rubber feet lift the drive off the ground so that air can enter from below to keep the drive from heating up. Power button is located on the rear side just above the USB 3.0 interface and has a decent feedback.

Test Setup:
Processor: Intel Core i7-2600K @3.4GHz
Motheboard: Intel DP67BG
RAM: 2x2GB Corsair Dominator DDR3 RAM @1333MHz (timing: 9-9-9-24)
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit)
OS Drive: Intel SSDSA2H080GIGN (80 GB SSD)
RAID 0 Combination: 2 x 300GB WD Velociraptor
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 6850
Power Supply: Corsair HX620W

Performance:
The drive gives unformatted space of 2794.94GB. It gave a Read Burst speed of 160.4 MB/s which was slower than that of ADATA Nobility NH03 which gives 185.7 MB/s. In the real world testing which involved transferring 4GB sequential and assorted files from the WD drive to the RAID array and back we got the following scores. Read / Write (sequential file) in MB/s – 120.11 / 111.6 and Read / Write (Assorted) in MB/s – 102.01 / 65.32. This performance was much slower than the ADATA Nobility NH03. Infact, the Assorted Write test was found to be slower than its Passport drive as well. Intra-drive testing was at par with the ADATA drive.

Verdict
Performance wise, the WD My Book Essential is not excellent and there are faster external drives in the market. But where the WD drive scores is on the price per GB. At a mere Rs.3.93, its cost per GB is lower than the better performing ADATA Nobility NH03 at Rs. 4.6. So if huge capacity is what you are looking at the WD My Book Essential comes recommended.

Features: 3.5/5
Performance: 3/5
Build Quality: 3.5/5
Value: 4/5
Overall3.5/5

Price: Rs. 10,999