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What HD is inside a WD My Book Essential?
- Thread starter Fiete5401
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I want to know if a drive by Hitachi or Western Digital is in use inside the My Book Essential.
Why not?
Because
A. Seems like a heck of a lot of work
B. Doesn't seems to be much of a point behind all of the work.
Because
A. Seems like a heck of a lot of work
B. Doesn't seems to be much of a point behind all of the work.
And C: Voids the warranty to open it up to peek.
That said, WD is a better source:
The drive inside your external hard drive enclosure may vary depending on application. There are several things you should know about WD external hard drives:
Depending on model, the internal hard drive in an external enclosure could be either SATA or native USB.
We can only guarantee drive capacity. We cannot guarantee a particular internal hard drive model, data interface, rotational speed, or cache size in the external hard drive enclosure.
Dismantling any single-drive external enclosure to obtain this information will void the warranty of the hard drive.
Interface and cache of the hard drives inside the external enclosure does not affect the performance or the data transfer rate of the external hard drive unit.
Note: With the exception of eSATA and USB 3.0 external hard drives, USB 2.0 and Firewire 400/800 have yet to approach the transfer rates of the internal hard drives we use in our external enclosures.
FWIW, I've got a WD My Passport for Mac USB 3.0 2 TB (WDBKKF0020BSL-EESN) and it shows up in Disk Utility as "2 TB WD WDC WD20NMVM-"+(something).
I can even see the models of my two 1 GB 3,5" WDs in the test RAID-0 in my USB 3.0 dual HD dock.
I think they showed up with model names after I installed the OS X SAT Smart Driver to enable SMART for my USB-drives:
https://github.com/kasbert/OS-X-SAT-SMART-Driver - just download the .dmg file
I'm using that both on Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion with no issues so far.
In my case, the WD20NMVM inside my WD My Passport for MAC USB 3.0 2 TB apparently is custom made and can't be used in other SATA-casings/docks:
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1951/1/ (towards the bottom)
(Boo hiss!)
Other than that, I'm happy with it. Bus-powered and silent and Mac software from WD.
Best regards,
Nikolaj
Thanks Nikolaj, the SAT SMART Driver did the job!
I found out that Western Digital built in a Hitachi drive:
Hitachi Deskstar 5K4000 4000GB, SATA 6Gb/s (HDS5C4040ALE630)
This is a really awesome hd! It's quiet and fast.
I'm happy to hear that
For anyone wondering why there is a Hitachi drive in a Western Digital product it is because WD bought the Hitachi hard drive business some time ago. And additionally I think I've read somewhere WD is being forced to sell off the Hitachi part of their 3.5" business to Toshiba as to secure competition for 3.5" products.
Those Deskstars certainly get to see the world!
Cheers,
Nikolaj
For anyone wondering why there is a Hitachi drive in a Western Digital product it is because WD bought the Hitachi hard drive business some time ago. And additionally I think I've read somewhere WD is being forced to sell off the Hitachi part of their 3.5" business to Toshiba as to secure competition for 3.5" products.
Those Deskstars certainly get to see the world!
Cheers,
Nikolaj