BUYER BEWARE: Drive Speed may Vary

WD Legacy Products Other Network Drives
1

As per Answer ID 1704

"

  • 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."

Translation: “We commodity source the drives inside our external enclosures.  In other words we put the cheapest possible drive on the market that we can find at any given time.  It might be noisier or slower than the drive we used last month, but it’s a cost savings to us so you’ll just have to deal with it.  And if you’re curious to see what you’ve purchased, we’ll void your warranty.  You can buy two drives under the same model number and one may be faster than the other.”

2

Most of the My Book drives use Caviar Green, now, you quoted answer ID 1704, this article also states:

“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”.

While I agree that sometimes you might encounter drives that are a bit slower than others, normally this are related to bad cable or USB interface.

Regarding the policy on enclosure dismantling, this is not a WD exclusive policy, all companies that manufacture drives will void the warranty of an external drive that has been opened without an authorization.