Since the advent of external USB storage devices, it’s been extremely easy to add storage to your computer without all of the popping open your case and cramming in the hard drive nonsense.

Western Digital’s My Book Essential Edition 1TB USB 2.0 external hard drive promises a good chunk of extra space at an extremely tempting price. There was a point in time where an external drive would set you back more than your run of the mill internal version but that price premium has slowly shrunk down to an acceptable profit-taking level.

The company touts the drive as a little eco-friendlier with up to 30% more energy efficiency than standard systems, which I take to mean competing brands that offer the same storage space using the same USB 2.0 interface.

Click the break for our full review.

Lets have a look at the drive

The drive’s glossy black exterior makes it look incredibly sleek, unfortunately it also makes it a dust and fingerprint magnet…if you’re the sort of person to be annoyed by such a thing. The drive itself is designed to stand vertically although some feet on its side would be a welcome addition, then again they want that “book” feeling for it.

It’s so dark light cannot escape it.

Western Digital’s drive diagnostics tool and trial software for Memeo’s backup software are preloaded. As I have no need for such software, it was indiscriminately wiped clean in the upcoming format.

Usage

It’s as simple as plugging in its power cord and connecting a USB cord from your PC to the drive. The drive itself ships formatted with the FAT32 file system so you’ll want to format it to whatever file system you hold dear (NTFS for the Windows crowd) if you want to transfer files larger than 4GB to it.

When the drive is in use the two LED lights on the front of the drive cycle back and forth slowly which can be a tiny bit distracting but, considering most desks nowadays, you have other LED lights to worry about.

As for its eco-tilt you’ll find the drive shuts off when you shut your PC off or unplug it saving that bit of electricty and while your computer is in use.  It also has an auto-spin down function where it turns off the drive completely if there’s no activity to it after a 10 minute period. It certainly will save you a bit of power but the lag time between trying to access the drive and it spinning up and being usable is a little infuriating.

We’re not here to test its power usage though, we want some performance numbers!

HD Tach

USB 2.0 tops out at 480Mbit/s transfer rate which roughly equates to 60MB/s, considering the amount of overhead any transfer protocol uses and other contributing factors 35MB/s average read speed across the whole drive isn’t bad at all. There are faster connectivity options out there, such as firewire and eSATA, but these are the issues you’ll run into with any USB device so you’ll have to keep that in mind.

A simple file transfer, to the drive, of three files totalling 1.02GB in size took a little over 45 seconds to complete. Copying the files back over to the computer took 20 seconds flat. A 23MB/s sequential write speed and a 51MB/s sequential read speed is about as much as you can expect out of a USB based hard drive.