The Western Digital My Book 3.0 desktop external drive will be one of the first to market with the new SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface. Announced today, the 1TB version is available for sale today; the 2TB is due later this week. So does USB 3.0 deliver on its promises? We got the 1TB My Book 3.0 into the PC World Lab, and our early results look very promising.
As an interface, USB 3.0 carries a lot of promise: Theoretically, the maximum performance of USB 2.0 was 480 Mbps, while that of USB 3.0 is 4.8 Gbps--a ten-fold theoretical increase. But in reality, the limitations of the drive itself--currently at 3.0Gbps--creates another bottleneck in the USB 3.0 environment. As such, industry experts are saying we can expect to see approximately a three-fold increase in real-world performance.
In the PC World Lab's tests, those estimates were borne out. We compared the My Book 3.0 as tested over USB 3.0 and USB 2.0, and compared it to a Western Digital My Book Home Edition 2TB tested over eSATA.
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