UPDATED - Help! - Western Digital My Book Essential 3TB [BlackMagic Speedtest]

[dasx]

Hey all.
I saw this offer in a local store where I could get the Western Digital My Book Essential (3TB) for €79. Checked it out and it indeed was the 3TB USB3.0 version, with a 7200rpm drive and all.

My two 500GB externals are running out of space so decided to make the change. Before buying, I looked on the internet for speed tests but didn't find much, so thought of sharing for if someone else ever needs this.

Have to say I'm very impressed. Didn't expect this speed. Yes, it's USB3.0, but it's a mechanical disk after all.

Just to compare, my 2010 13" MBP SATA2 SSD does around 160MB/s for both write and read.
(Although of course it's slow compared to internal SataIII SSDs)

EDIT: Updated.

 

[drsox]

Hey all.
I saw this offer in a local store where I could get the Western Digital My Book Essential (3TB) for €79. Checked it out and it indeed was the 3TB USB3.0 version, with a 7200rpm drive and all.

My two 500GB externals are running out of space so decided to make the change. Before buying, I looked on the internet for speed tests but didn't find much, so thought of sharing for if someone else ever needs this.

Have to say I'm very impressed. Didn't expect this speed. Yes, it's USB3.0, but it's a mechanical disk after all.

Just to compare, my 2010 13" MBP SATA2 SSD does around 160MB/s for both write and read.
(Although of course it's slow compared to internal SataIII SSDs)

Here's a speed test through native SATA2 on a 3TB WDGL drive : http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1285-page4.html
USB3 shouldn't limit the speed anyway unless there is some USB3/2 compatibility issues.
Quoted rates are not too far away : Average rate - 122.7MBps. Max rate - 165.8MBps.

With modern high density drives, data rates are respectable. It's the access times that kills mechanical drives compared to SSDs. As SSDs get faster (todays SSDs are at 500+ MBps) and cheaper, then mechanicals will fade away except for mass storage.

I haven't had a mechanical drive in my PCs for 5 years - only in my NASs.

 

[dasx]

Here's a speed test through native SATA2 on a 3TB WDGL drive : http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1285-page4.html
USB3 shouldn't limit the speed anyway unless there is some USB3/2 compatibility issues.
Quoted rates are not too far away : Average rate - 122.7MBps. Max rate - 165.8MBps.

Well yeah, I know. My point was I'm surprised, that's all.
I didn't expect a mechanical external drive to achieve those speeds. I was super happy with my 500GB FW800 drive which could get 70MB/s for both read and write so doubling it is amazing.

I have an external 128GB SSD which I use as backup of my main data, but when moving 20GB files to an external you thank it has these transfers rates.

 

[Ifti]

I'd be happy with those speeds, and with that price!
You picked up a bargain!

 

[dasx]

OK this is weird. It's been 5 months and for no apparent reason I decided to run the test again today. Found out speeds are the half what they used to be.

Disk is a little more than half full (i.e. 1.7TB out of 3TB), I'm using the same computer, same port, same everything.

It's always on and plugged in, but so is the internal drive and it keeps scoring the same speeds (256GB SSD).

What's going on?

 

[dasx]

OK, after panicking a little bit I ran two tests. Copy a 20GB file from my internal to the external and then backwards.

Recorded all data to a file using the command:

iostat -w1 > Desktop/file

Then processed the file so I got the average transfer speed with:

cat Desktop/file | awk '{if (($6+0)>0) {a+=$6; b+=1}} END {print a/b}'

(The ($6+0>0) is to discard text, e.g. "disk1" or "MB/s", so only text is processed)

Results:

Read: 132.64 MB/s
Write: 68.13 MB/s

Write speed does indeed seem low to me… Didn't run this test when I first bought the drive so can't really tell if it's normal. :/
As for read speed, looks perfectly fine.

Thanks anyways, and of course, any input would be appreciated.