Western Digital My Book 500 GB Pro Edition - Review

Perfomance

Western Digital's My Book Pro has set itself apart from the competition in more ways than one. Whereas most external hard drives only offer connectivity through USB 2.0, which is satisfactory if your not planning to do anything to intensive, most people who want a bit more performance will opt for an external hard drive with a Firewire connection and this is where the Western Digital shines.
The My Book Pro utilizes a Firewire 800 connection and this is abundantly clear in our tests. When we look at CPU usage whilst running the HDTune test, we see that if we use a USB 2.0 connection that the CPU usage is 12,9%. When we connect the hard drive through Firewire on the same system CPU usage drops to 1%, a noticeable difference for any user.
Another point of interest is the difference in performance when comparing Firewire 800 to Firewire 400 and USB 2.0. When using either Firewire 400 or USB 2.0 whilst running PCMark 05 results in a score of around 3200, using Firewire 800 the hard drive attains a score of no less than 5019 points in PCMark 05 and taking the HDTune scores into consideration the overall performance is very close to that of the internal SATA version of the drive.