Some Western Digital My Book drives shipping with discrete enterprise HDD inside

By Jon Martindale March 24, 2016

some western digital my book drives shipping with discrete enterprise hdd inside hgstmybook01 — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Along with Western Digital’s announcement of its new, helium-filled, Western Digital Red hard drives earlier this month, the storage manufacturer also debuted its new My Book portable drives. Since the My Book drive is of a similar capacity, it made sense that the Red drives would probably be used as part of them, but it turns out that at least some early release My Book drives came packing something else entirely.

When it received its My Book review unit, PCPer noticed that some My Book drives were already available in the shops. Not sure how that was possible, PCPer ran out to buy one to see just what was inside. If the WD Reds had only just been released too, what hard drive did Western Digital put in these early release My Books?

It turns out that the company opted for an enterprise-level drive from subsidiary Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST). The My Book line is not aimed at high-performance users, but the drive is particularly fast, able to output an average “transfer rate” in HD Tune Pro of 165MBps. Its burst rate even worked at 300MBps when connected up directly to a test system.

Related: Seagate is finally joining HGST in its helium-filled hard drive efforts

A bigger deal out of all of this though is the price. The new My Books are retailing at $250 but if you want to buy one of the HGST 8TB drives by itself, you would be looking at spending up to $500. So if you picked up a My Book recently you might have gotten yourself quite a deal.

However, this seems unlikely to last. It was probably only the case for a few of the early release models and in reality it seems likely that any newly produced My Books will ship with WD’s helium-filled Red drives instead. The HGST drives can’t be confirmed to be present in My Books from other retailers either, so don’t go out and buy a number of them hoping to make a quick profit.

It’s even possible that Western Digital will soon begin shipping My Books with a slowed down version of the Red too — essentially, nothing is guaranteed here.

But some people did likely get themselves quite a deal while it lasted.

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