WD Announces New 3 TB External HDD

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Following Seagate's lead, Western Digital reveals a 3 TB external hard drive.

Monday brought rumors that Western Digital (WD) was gearing up to introduce a 3 TB hard drive, however the company made it official on Tuesday. The announcement trails behind Seagate's own 3 TB GoFlex Desk external hard drive released back in July, the first of its size to hit the market.

According to WD, the new 3 TB drive will be part of the company's My Book Essential line of external drives consisting of both dual USB 3.0/2.0 and cheaper USB 2.0-only models. The dual-interface 3.0/2.0 models will offer a choice of 3 TB, 2 TB and 1 TB capacities, whereas the USB 2.0-only models will offer capacities of 2 TB, 1.5 TB, 1 TB, 750 GB, 640 GB, and 500 GB.

Tuesday Western Digital also said it added a 500 GB USB 3.0 model to its My Passport Essential line of portable drives. Consumers can choose between five “fun” colors-- Midnight Black, Cool Silver, Real Red, Pacific Blue and Arctic White.

The company also added two USB 3.0 drives to its My Passport Essential SE line offering 750 GB and 1 TB capacities. The drives will be offered in stylish black, silver, metallic blue and metallic red colors.

WD said that all drives are formatted NTFS for Windows XP/Vista/7, and require reformatting for Mac OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard.

Pricing for the 500 GB My Passport Essential portable drive will be $99.99 USD. The My Passport Essential SE drives ranges from $129.99 USD to $169.99 USD, and the My Book Essential drives ranges from $129.99 USD to $249.99 USD. They are available now at select US retailers and through WD's online store.

Kevin Parrish
21 Comments Comment from the forums
  • hellwig
    Sorry, but its not dual-interface when its USB 3.0/2.0, is it? My understanding is that USB 3.0 is backwards-compatible. Therefore, if you connect a USB 3.0 slot to a device via a USB 2.0 cable, it will revert to the USB 2.0 signaling (same if you connect a USB 3.0 device to a USB 2.0 slot). That's not dual-interface.

    We really need more people to adopt open filesystems like ext or XFS or something. As far as I know, MacOS can't write to NTFS, and some Linux distros (Ubuntu in particular) won't write to it by default either. Makes it real fun to transport files back and forth between computers if they aren't all running Windows.
    Reply
  • tburns1
    Why do nit-wits like to say "First!"?
    Reply
  • tburns1
    I guess I'm one now (and not a very good one at that). ;)
    Reply
  • drwho1
    so when will the 3TB Internal drives be available?
    and what is their size after formatted?

    I know that 2TB only has 1.81TB after formatted so I'm guessing around 2.6TB after formatted, does anybody knows?
    Reply
  • theoutbound
    More storage is great, but I hope they have solved the heating issues that Seagates's 3TB drive had.
    Reply
  • blink180heights
    i can't even fill up half of my 1TB HDD if i tried, now they come out with 3TB wtf
    Reply
  • lasaldude
    blink180heightsi can't even fill up half of my 1TB HDD if i tried, now they come out with 3TB wtf
    You need to Pirate Games and Video, Then you fill up a TB in a month or two easily. More if so if it is in HD.
    Reply
  • techguy378
    hellwigSorry, but its not dual-interface when its USB 3.0/2.0, is it? My understanding is that USB 3.0 is backwards-compatible. Therefore, if you connect a USB 3.0 slot to a device via a USB 2.0 cable, it will revert to the USB 2.0 signaling (same if you connect a USB 3.0 device to a USB 2.0 slot). That's not dual-interface.We really need more people to adopt open filesystems like ext or XFS or something. As far as I know, MacOS can't write to NTFS, and some Linux distros (Ubuntu in particular) won't write to it by default either. Makes it real fun to transport files back and forth between computers if they aren't all running Windows.I have an early 2009 Mac Mini with Snow Leopard and it can read AND write to Windows Vista/7 NTFS file systems without a problem. I was able to do this with Mac OS X 10.5 as well.
    Reply
  • aevm
    drwho1so when will the 3TB Internal drives be available?and what is their size after formatted?I know that 2TB only has 1.81TB after formatted so I'm guessing around 2.6TB after formatted, does anybody knows?
    I expect the real size will be close to 3,000,000,000,000 bytes, which is a bit under 2796 GB or 2.728 TB. You can do the math yourself for any size by taking the number of bytes and dividing by 1024 a few times.
    Reply
  • big_BDS
    would like to see the actually drive betting that it is 2 1.5T drive mashed together just like seagates
    Reply