Product: Western Digital Elements 2TB USB 2.0 Desktop External HDD
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Introduction:

Western Digital has been one of the biggest mainstays when it comes to hard drives and for as long as I have known about computer technology, they have been making hard drives. Today we will be looking at one of their external hard drive products, the WD Elements 2TB USB external HDD. As stated in the title of the product, it is a USB 2.0 only drive, but even though it may not be the fastest and newest of technology, it sure has a boat load of storage to make up for its lacking attributes.

 
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Thoughts:

The drive has a nice glossy finish on all four sides, but on the top it has a subtle bumpy texture with a matte finish. Another subtle aesthetic feature to this drive is that along with the ports, the status light is also in the back so that you are able to see by reflection that the drive is active while not being distracted by a flashing light.

 

Although the drive is a USB 2.0 drive, the power that it requires is drawn from the AC adapter that is included with it. I can see how it might be a little cumbersome to carry around the drive and all its cords but considering the storage size of the drive, needing any other storage device becomes a mute point! Installation of the drive is pretty straight forward and easy; just insert the cables into their respective outlets or plugs and wait for windows to install the drivers from the drive itself.


On the next page we will delve into the features and specifications of the drive along with the performance test results.

Features and Specifications:

The following Features and Specifications have been taken from Western Digital’s website.

Features:

WD quality inside and out
Designed with the same commitment to quality that made WD external drives the number one selling drives in the world.

Preformatted for PCs
Designed for use with Windows-based computers. Can be easily reformatted for use with Macs.

Power miser
WD Elements external drives with WD GreenPower Technology™ are designed to save energy. They reduce internal drive power consumption by up to 30%, a sleep mode reduces power during idle times, and a power-saving feature turns the drive on and off with your computer.

Plug-and-play simplicity
Just connect the power adapter and plug the drive in to a USB port to instantly add more storage to your computer.

USB 2.0 interface
A simple connection that offers convenience and compatibility among multiple computers.

Planet friendly
We designed a small retail box from recycled materials to minimize waste. We encourage you to recycle it.

 

Specifications:

On the last page we'll take a look at testing the 2TB External Drive from Western Digital before we wrap things up with our conclusion.

Testing:

Today, most new boards have USB 2.0 on them and as such I connected this drive to a USB 2.0 port on the back of the P5N32-e Sli board by ASUS. CrystalDisk Mark and HD Tune were two programs used to take some benchmarks of the drive. Unfortunately some of the write tests in HD Tune were unable to be run do to various issues with the partition on the drive. Here are the results from CrystalDisk Mark.

 

Now in switching to HD Tune there were some additional tests that were able to be done but the majority of the write tests were unable to be completed because it wanted to have the current partition deleted, which was not feasible with the current setup of the drive. Below are some of the results of those tests.\

 

Overall the tests showed some pretty good speeds for being a USB 2.0 external drive. Although the speeds may not be as fast as other methods that are offered on the market, the amount of storage provided is able to offset that as well. As displayed by the test results you can expect an average read speed of 34 to 35 MB/s and write speeds between 30 to 33 MB/s. Based on these results this drive is a great solution for media storage such as movies, music, etc, and is great for sharing media over a network as well. Even though the write speeds are a little bit slower than the read speeds, once you get the data on to the drive you can expect uninterrupted steaming of media from the drive to the destination player. The only time you may get an interruption of a stream is if there is an issue with the network that the drive is on.

 

Conclusion:

If you crave faster speeds than what this drive is able to deliver, this drive is not for you. However, if you crave storage instead of speed, this drive would be perfect for you. This drive runs silently, smoothly and works pretty fast. The transfer speeds are pretty good and I have not experienced one problem with it. The only downside I have had with this drive is that after it comes out of its power save mode it takes a couple of seconds to spin up, but I can live with that. On another note, if you plan to purchase more than one of these, WD mentions that even though they look stackable, you should refrain from stacking them. The other great thing is that it seems as though this drive is almost always on sale.

 

Pros:

• Great performance for a USB 2.0 drive
• Very easy to install and use
• Runs quiet and cool
• Massive amount of storage
• Great quality overall
  

Cons:

• Limited by only being USB connection
• Included USB cable is a little short
• On boot up or restarts when the drive is plugged in, it stalls the computer from doing the post tests, have to unplug it and let the posting start before plugging it back in. Not sure if this is a byproduct of the way motherboards are now a days or if it’s just a problem with my own system. (Could not seem to resolve it from bios settings)