Western Digital WD My Book Home USB Portable Drive

The Western Digital WD MyBook Home is in a sleek new shell. Its curves seem a bit softer and there is a new activity light. The old model had two circles: one for activity, and one circle that filled up as the drive was loaded with files. This new version has just a single LED strip, Knight Rider-style, that bounces back and forth during activity and then lights up as you fill the drive up. Also, rather than a bright blue light, the new display is silver and easier on the eyes.The WD MyBook Home USB Portable drive has three interfaces. There’s USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and eSATA. This has made a big hit with PC users, Mac folks, and all of those on the bleeding edge with eSATA. Unfortunately, while the package includes a USB 2.0 cable and a FireWire cable, it has no eSATA cable. A 3 foot eSATA cable from WD for $10 if you want the speed boost afforded by the eSATA interface.The drive’s capacity is a large 1TB. Though some might say “You should never put that much data on one drive,”. There should be no problem with that, so long as you have it backed up. Using this backup logic, you could back up 2 500GB internal drives with a 1TB drive. You should never put any data, regardless of size, on just one drive if it’s important to you. The beauty of large backup drives is that they let you backup multiple smaller drives.On the software side WD has changed from the use of Dantz to Memeo. Even though the company still calls its software WD Anywhere, it is using Memeo, which is also used by Buffalo on its external drives. Memeo is excellent software that instantly backs up any files that are added to a backup source. WD has also included a bunch of free Google software, including Picasa, Google Toolbar and Google Desktop.The Western Digital WD MyBook Home can be purchased from USB Portable Drives.com for $150 for 1TB or $205 for a 2TB drive.