Linux Hardware: External Hard Drive: WD My Book

A customer recently picked up three of these Western Digital hard drives, two for their office backup and one for our office, to use as remote backup.

Western Digital MyBook 3TB has the space you need!

We hooked 'em up to the USB3 card that I recently purchased and wow do they fly!  The spacious 3TB of space means that the rsnapshot backups that we run with this client should give us a lot of room for growth in the future, and the SuperSpeed USB (aka USB3) allows for quick restores of even the largest files.  Very cool that Linux has USB3 support before any other operating system, is it not?

These are the third set of Western Digital My Book external drives that we've purchased for this client.  The previous drives had less capacity and although they worked perfectly for years, its not a bad idea to replace older drives with newer ones before the Big Restore is needed and the drive picks that day to fail.  You know, it's bound to happen.  Newer drives, after their burn in, should reset the clock on the lifespan of these backup devices.  (Of course, no one knows for sure how long a drive will last, which is why the customer bought three of them!)

This is USB3 and Wireless-N combined!

At home, we also have a My Book external drive which we use with unison to keep the Photos/ folder and the Music/ folder in sync between the basement office computer and the living room laptop.  Unison works great, transfer speeds over Wireless-N means that our files stay in sync, and the reliable Western Digital My Book has our files, always available.