WD Announces New Additions to My Book HDD Line

Western Digital has announced a handful of new drives for its My Book line of external storage solutions. The drives utilize USB 3.0 and are available in 2 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB capacities. They also come with WD SmartWare Pro automatic back-up software with Dropbox integration, which offers cloud backup capabilities, and WD Edition of Acronis True Image, which allows users to execute a full system backup.

"The new generation of My Book external hard drives provides greater speed, flexibility, content safety, and system security for our customers," said Scott Steffens, general manager of WD's consumer storage products group. "Consumers are creating, downloading, and storing more digital content than ever before and our line of desktop drives are equipped with capacities and security measures to keep it all backed-up and protected against system disaster, damage or theft."

The new My Book drives are already available via WD's website, and pricing for these drives ranges from $129.99 for the 2 TB, to $149.99 for the 3 TB and $179.99 for the 4 TB. It's worth noting that Mac users won't be able to get the 4 TB version.

Follow Jane McEntegart @JaneMcEntegart. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

  • Shaun o
    Thanks for the heads up.
    Shame they have a high fail rate.



    Reply
  • Pherule
    WD drives do not have a high fail rate. Got myself a WD 3TB mybook, USB3 and it is quite awesome (aside from the noise and lengthy spinup time) but transfer rate is around 150MB/s (yes that's megabytes, not megabits) which is very acceptable for a spin drive.
    Reply
  • JPNpower
    Lets hope that they fixed the breaking USB 3 fiasco. Look it up. It gives the WD far higher fail rate than other external drives.
    Reply
  • Shaun o
    Pherule,

    See you in about Six months.
    While you about it, take the time too look at the forums here.
    See how many times the same problems are duplicated.

    There are about three symptoms that always crop up.
    Reply
  • Shaun o
    Pherule,

    See you in about Six months.
    While you about it, take the time too look at the forums here.
    See how many times the same problems are duplicated.

    There are about three symptoms that always crop up.
    Reply
  • Pherule
    Of course they break, they're spin drives, some are bound to break. But overall they are far, far more stable than Seagate.
    Reply
  • warmon6
    11605187 said:
    Pherule,

    See you in about Six months.
    While you about it, take the time too look at the forums here.
    See how many times the same problems are duplicated.

    There are about three symptoms that always crop up.

    I must be lucky then as my 2 WD drives (Caviar SE 160GB from 2005 and a My Book Essentials 500GB drive from 2008) have have been working just fine :p (or WD sucked after that point.)

    In all honesty though, You can go to any forum beyond tom's hardware and you'll find each place a bit different. Some forum, you'll see more seagate drive issues, others could be toshiba's, ect. Then there are other forums that you find a nice mix of different company drives that have issues.

    Basically, all i'm saying is, a single forum isn't the best way to judge a hardware failure rate and even then, even multiple forums isn't the best place to judge. (Although multiple forums make it at least a little better in figuring it out.)

    Have to find those statistics that actually show how an company overall is doing.
    Reply
  • Howkey
    Just sent my 1 year old WD essential 2TB back to dealer, broken. They have the new ones in store now so i will get either money back or this new one. Hope it will be more reliable. I lost 2TB of data with it, dueto ecryption it cant be rescued.
    Reply