Flott, well finished and quiet

PACKAGING AND DELIVERY:
The hard drive has arrived well packaged with me. The scope of supply in addition to the hard drive itself belongs the power adapter and a USB 3.0 cable. A Quick Start Guide is also included. A software CD, there is not, the supplied software is stored on the hard disk itself.

CONNECTION
The hard disk can both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports to be operated. The connection to both versions without problems. The necessary drivers are installed automatically. Only one SAS driver can not be installed automatically. This is also not necessary for the normal operation of the hard disk and is installed together with the supplied software. The setup file for the driver can be found but also separately on the hard disk, so that the driver can be installed even without having to install the complete software package.

SOFTWARE:
The supplied software does not need to be installed for normal use. It offers the possibility to create a backup on the external hard drive to format and protect them with a password. The latter function is hardly documented, so that you do not know here, if the hard drive will be encrypted, or is provided with only a simple access control by password. Whoever puts real value on safety, should resort to other solutions here. The backup - function is quite simple and certainly served its purpose. The software, however, leaves me with a very split impression, because it has completely denied 7 computer on a Windows their service on a Windows Vista computer, however, was to use without problems.

SPEED:
Since this is indeed a hard drive to a terminal is 3.0 standard under the new USB, of course, particularly the achievable speed is interesting. A corresponding Benchmark Tool brought values ​​of about 95 MB / s for days. By comparison, a circa six months old USB 2.0 hard drive reached the same computer about 30 MB / s. The internal, approximately one and a half year-old computer hard drive, made it to about 75 MB / s. The Western Digital hard drive thus reached the highest. Especially compared to the USB 2.0 hard drive makes it clear that the drive from Western Digital is about 3 to fill times faster than a USB 2.0 hard drive.

CONCLUSION:
In the Western Digital hard drive almost all fits together. Only the software could not completely convince me. It is fair to say that other manufacturers do not even mitliefern such. The hard drive was able to convince beyond especially with its speed, good workmanship and a low noise level. A positive feature is also a switch on the housing, which saves the user the constant unplugging for turning off the hard drive.
From me there is 5 out of 5 stars for the My Book Essential.