Attractively designed in a rounded sleek metal jacket and sporting a funky blue capacity gauge, Western Digital’s MyBook range of external hard drives are aimed at consumers looking for a stylish solution to their storage problems.
The drives can be used horizontally or vertically and come in two sizes – 250GB or 500GB, – and three ‘editions’ offering extra features.
We reviewed the 500GB My Book Pro Edition which offers three ways of hooking up the drive to your PC; FireWire 800, FireWire 400, and USB 2.0.
All leads were provided in the box, and we tested both the FireWire 400, and USB 2.0 interfaces with no problem.
Also bundled in the package is the handy EMC Retrospect Express backup and recovery software, with the drive coming with a 3-year limited warranty.
Setting up the drive was a cinch: we simply plugged the drive into a USB port our Windows XP machine, and the drive utilities were automatically installed.
With the drivers installed, we were able to switch to our preferred FireWire 400 connection and the drive was ready for use.
Blue light fever
As the name suggests, the drive is hardback-sized, and could sit happily on a bookshelf although the glowing blue capacity gauge on the front might look a tad odd amongst the Mills & Boon.
We loved the glowing gauge though: it fades in and out when the drive is turned on and off and does a nice little shimmy when in use.
The outer ring displays the power/activity functions, while the inner ring is split into six sections which illuminate as the space is progressively used up. It’s a nice touch.
Lurking inside the 500GB drive is a 7,200rpm drive with a 16MB cache and a quoted seek time of 8.9ms, and we found it very fast in use and had no problems running video files straight off the disk.
Right now we can’t imagine filling up that 500GB in a hurry, but for drive space demons, Western Digital has recently announced the My Book Pro Edition II, which crams in two 500GB drives in an extended case to give you a massive whopping 1TB of storage – enough for about a zillion photographs (all right, up to 284,000 photos according to Western Digital’s figures).
Although the drive is quiet in use, you can certainly feel it vibrating if you’ve got it on the same surface as your machine, so we recommend lobbing it up on to a shelf.
Conclusion
We loved the My Book so much we went out and bought the thing – so now we won’t have any excuses to not back up our data.
It’s a shame that there’s no networking option, but with an online price hovering around the £180, the My Book drive still represents remarkable value for money.
With a choice of three interfaces, we should have no problem using the drive with a variety of desktop PCs and laptops, and unlike many other external hard drives, this one actually looks nice too.
Our verdict
Features: 75%
Ease of Use: 85%
Build Quality: 90%
Overall: 87%
Specs
Performance Specifications
Rotational Speed 7,200 RPM (nominal)
Average Latency 4.20 ms (nominal)
Seek Times
Read Seek Time 8.9 ms
Track-To-Track Seek Time 2.0 ms (average)
Serial Transfer Rate
FireWire 800
Serial Bus Transfer Rate (1394b) 800 Mbits/s (Max)
FireWire 400
Serial Bus Transfer Rate (1394a) 400 Mbits/s (Max)
USB 2.0
Serial Bus Transfer Rate (USB 2.0) 480 Mbits/s (Max)
Physical Specifications
Formatted Capacity 500,107 MB
Capacity 500 GB
Interface Triple Interface
Physical Dimensions
Height 6.780 Inches (Max)- 172.2 mm (Max)
Length 5.630 Inches (Max) – 143 mm (Max)
Width 2.23 Inches – 56.7 mm
Weight 2.60 Pounds – 1.2 kg
Electrical Specifications
Current Requirements
Power Dissipation
AC Input Voltage 100-240 VAC
AC Input Frequency 47-63 Hz
The Nintendo DS has emerged as the top selling gaming device in both the US and the UK during 2006.
Americans certainly went waheey for the Wii, with 604,200 consoles shifted in December, backed up by brisk business for extra games.
Despite the bumper sales, Wii’s still remain as rare as a Cardiff City away win, with Nintendo Europe MD Laurent Fischer admitting that the company is still “facing stock shortages.”
A new survey has seen Google continuing to exert its dominance on the US web search market, grabbing a huge 47.4 per cent of the sector, up 0.4 per cent during December.
Also heading downwards was InterActiveCorp’s Ask.com search engine, slipping 0.1 per cent to 5.4 per cent.
The overall US search market has ballooned by 30 per cent since December of 2005, with comScore reporting that consumers performed 3.2 billion searches on Google sites and 1.9 billion searches on Yahoo!
Asus has announced some of technical details of its second generation luxury laptop, the Lamborghini branded VX2, which comes compete with a leather-bound palm rest.
Despite the Lamborghini badge on the lid, you won’t find a v8 engine inside but a rather sprightly 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo T5600 processor with Intel 945GM Express integrated graphics and 1GB of memory (with an option to install an extra half a gig).
The lappie weighs in at 1.86kg (2kg with extended battery) and measures up at 317×228.6×32.15~37.5mm.
Once again Apple’s legal team have rolled into action, this time over mobile phone ‘skins’ based on their new iPhone interface.
Although the skins were offered for free – and probably served as a great advert for Apple’s as yet unreleased phone – as soon as Apple’s head honchos caught wind of them, they reached for the speed dial and unleashed their ever-busy lawyers.
“Apple therefore demands that you remove this screenshot from your website and refrain from facilitating the further dissemination of Apple’s copyrighted material by removing the link to http://forum.xda-developers.com, where said icons and screenshot are being distributed.”
The deal serves up the usual “up to” 8Mbps connection, and comes with a free bundled wireless Sky router and a fairly generous 40GB monthly usage allowance, which should be enough to keep most multimedia fans happily gorging on new content.
Before you get too excited and start flicking your cash in the direction of that lovely Mr Murdoch, bear in mind that the service is only available to customers close to exchanges already unbundled by Sky.
It may be nowhere as much fun as the near-vapourware 
If the mood takers you, you can also turn your workspace into a mini disco, with music skins that “dance” to the music, as keys are triggered by whatever music you’re playing on your PC (we could imagine it proving a little difficult to operate if you’re playing thrash metal. The lights! The lights!)
In the company’s marketing guff, Luxiium bang on about the keyboard be using to “relieve stress via colour therapy”, but we reckon most people will like it because it’s a bit of a laugh. After all, who wants to be stuck with a boring pile of keys when you can have a mini Pink Flowd lighting rig on your desktop?
High spending Americans splashed out over 100 billion dollars buying stuff on the web last year, with the popularity of Internet shopping set to keep on soaring.
Clearly, Sony’s Memorable Product Name Division were all on an extended tea-break during development, with the new camcorders all bearing fiddly and instantly forgettable names: DCR-DVD106E, DCR-DVD109E, DCR-DVD306E, DCR-DVD406E and DCR-DVD506E.
The upmarket DVD406E and DVD506E models also offer ClearVid CMOS Sensor technology for sharper images, with the topdog DVD506E 6.1MP cam sporting a hefty 6.1 MP still camera and Super SteadyShot Optical Image Stabilisation
Pricing is also still to be confirmed.
Employing a carousel-style interface, the application comes with Yahoo! Go ‘widgets’ offering e-mail, local information and maps, news, sports, finance, entertainment, weather, photo sharing and search functionality.
Yahoo! Go also makes it easy to get to other websites, without the need to faff about with al that fiddly http://www stuff – just type in the name of a website and you’ll be taken to the site.
News, Sports, Entertainment, Weather and Finance info can accessed via various widgets, with the ability to add new content via customised RSS feeds.