I’m trying to decide whether to buy a My Book or a third-party enclosure and a WD bare drive. Can anyone tell me which WD drives are in the following products?
My Book Essential 1 TB
My Book Essential 2 TB
My Book Essential 1.5 TB (not on WD site but at Newegg)
WD doesn’t give that information for some reason, so without opening the case is not possible to know.
That’s why I asked here (in addition to opening a ticket with WD support – which has had no response). I thought that it was possible that some user(s) had opened the case of one or more of these products (after the warranty had expired … or not) and had looked inside.
I suppose one reason for the official silence is that WD may use whatever model drive they happen to have the most of at any particular time – sometimes using a Caviar Green drive, other times using something else.
In addition to any potential reliability differences between different WD drive types, there is also the question of whether a particular drive uses 4K Logical Sectors, which will not work with system images created by Windows 7 backup (although there is a WD fix for that: http://tinyurl.com/bvgwzzx). But maybe only WD drives > 2.5 TB use 4K logical sectors, so that’s not a problem for the 1 and 2 TB products.