FEATURE
HGST
For decades, industry insiders have said that HGST (formerly
Hitachi, and before that IBM) hard drives are consistently the
most reliable. Independent data from Backblaze now confirms
this. HGST has merged with Western Digital but it still operates
as its own entity and quality is as high as ever. Another
interesting finding from Backblaze: 4TB hard drives are much
more reliable than 3TB hard drives. We're waiting to see what
Backblaze will say about 6TB hard drives. Whatever size you
choose, HGST still makes the best hard drives out there.
The external drive that does everything
Western Digital's My Passport Wireless is the first portable
external drive we've seen that does everything.
1. It works as a direct USB 3 external (2TB).
2. It works as a wireless NAS
3. It works as a wireless transmitter to other computers, tablets
and smartphones
It does all of this simply and automatically. Everything just
works. Last year, you couldn't connect to products like this
without disrupting your internet access. This year all those
problems have gone away. The MyPassport Wireless has
reasonable battery life, letting you dish up media and data
wherever you go.
Can it be criticized? Yes: we would have preferred it to be
slightly smaller. But we recognize WD would have had to
sacrifice battery life for that. We'd also prefer an SSD to a hard
drive, but that would have raised the price too much.
For the future, we hope Western Digital will be let desktop-
sized RAID-enabled NAS's utilize the dual NAS and direct
technology they've so successfully deployed in this milestone
product.
For 2015 the MyPassport Wireless is our favorite external
storage product. We are in awe of the Western Digital software
and hardware engineers who came to together to 'just make
the product work.'
IWARDS 2015
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