I bought a 2TB My Book for Mac with the intention attaching it to my Synology DS713+ (which has USB 3 ports) to be used in the home
My desires for this drive are:
Should go quiet (aka low power or sleep , prefereable with drives spun down) when not in use.
Definitely must have good throughput with USB 3.0 (note my NAS also has an esata port)
ideally I could configure the NAS to send it a password so that the backusp from the NAS are encrypted.
After trying some things, i do not believe #3 can be done with my NAS.despite the fact the my book for mac offers hardware encryption
Now, in trying to find the differences between the many Western Digital External Drive options, it was very hard to determine what differencse the drives have so I can decide if I made the correct choice. I could use some help in trying to decide whther or not to return this drive for another model. I do not care what the default file system the drive is formatted as. The MyBook for Mac does have a USB3/USB2 port to support devices with either. It claims up to 5GB/s second for USB 3.
Q 1) What differences, if any, are there between the WD My Book for Mac and the WD My Book essentials. Are there any hardware differences at all? Do they both park the drive or enter some lower power state?
Q 2) Any other recommendations for the appropriate My Book?
The WD My Book Essential and WD My Book for Mac are best described as brothers, with the main (And arguably only important) difference being the file system used for distribution.
The WD My Book Essential comes factory-formatted as NTFS for out-of-the-box Windows compatibility, while the WD My Book for Mac comes factory-formatted as HFS+ for out-of-the-box Mac OS compatibility.
Since the the device in question is aimed to be used on a third-party NAS system as per your post, then perhaps a WD Elements would be a better option in my experience (Even though it does not offer USB 3.0 at this time) since the encryption system and drivers for the Essential and Mac can not be guaranteed to fully operate on third-party NAS devices, while the WD Elements is more universal.
Thanks for replying to my posts. I just looked at the western digital site and according to the information I see ( http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=470 ) the WD Elements does support USB3.0 . I see no mentioned of encryption in this model so I assume it does not have it. However, since it does appear to be USB 3.0 compatible it elements meet my needs since it does not look like drive encryption will work with the synology anyway.
Any idea what hard drives the MyBook and the Elements use and even though they appear to both be USB 3.0, what there throughput is so I can compare the two.
My apologies, I was referencing the WD Elements [Desktop] edition since it would be on the same “Desktop” category as the WD My Book family instead of the portable family, as power is another aspect to consider. The WD Elements [Portable] does offer USB 3.0, while the WD Elements [Desktop] is only available in USB 2.0.
On regards to the exact model of the unit inside the casing, it is very hard to tell as explained in the following link:
Again thank for your help. This has been useful information.
I now see the WD elements desktop edition. Yeah USB 2.0 is a no go for me. I will stick with the Mybook for Mac since it is the same as the Mybook essentials and Synology indicates myBook essentials is compatible with the DS713+
Wow, there are so many different variations on the external hard drive category for Western Digital.
I appreciate you guys pointing me to the product selection tool for external hard-drives, but there are so many variations it still would be useful to have a mega table with all the currently sold external drive products as columns and features and functionality as rows. This list would have only the currently sold versions of a given product. When trying to track down info I often found mybook information that was no longer applicable since it was for older versions.
While I appreciate the flexibillity offered by having so many different variations, I wonder if WD has considered simplifying the line up.