Western Digital (WDXUB1200BBNN) 120 GB USB 2.0 Hard Drive

The Western Digital 120GB Dual Option Back Up USB Drive is a 7200 rpm 120GB hard drive housed in an external enclosure. This drive is coupled with a "lite", but truly functional version of Dantz Retrospect backup software, that is integrated into the design of the drive. There are two buttons on the drive itself, that when pushed start either the automatic or a manual backup options in the Retrospect software. The "Dual Option" name of this drive refers to the manual and automatic backup options.

A couple months ago, the computer in my parents home stopped working, failing to turn on, suspiciously, the night after a bad storm. Turns out the hard drive and data were all ok, but I realized that they needed a simple data back up solution for their PC. Circuit City had this drive on sale for $69 after rebate. It appeared to be a simple and reliable backup system suitable for casual PC users, so I purchased it and first set it up on my PC to try out, knowing I'd later ship it to my parents and help them install it over the phone or via a remote PC access program called LogMeIn.

Installation

In the box is quick install guide, software cd, power cord, usb cable, power supply, the drive itself, and a pair of mounting feet allowing the drive to be stored horizontally or vertically. The drive housing is dark grey with silver trim, and is almost 2" thick, 6" wide, and about 9.25" long. There are three buttons on front of the drive, power, autobackup, and manual backup. The WD dual option backup drive "feels" and "looks to be very solidly built. The included backup software is for PC only, but the startup guide does give instructions for using the drive with a Mac.

Installation of the software and hardware was easy on my Win XP system. The drive was connected to a Dell 4550 PC with 768mb of ram and a 2.66ghz Pentium 4 cpu. Running the setup.exe file on the CD installed Dantz Retrospect Express on my system. After connecting the power cord to the drive, and connecting a USB cable from the drive to my PC, Windows recognized the new drive as a WD12000BB external drive, and reported that the drive had 111gb of free space (120,002,000,000 bytes). One new icon was inserted into the notification area of my task bar (the 21st such icon......), called the WD Button Manager. The WD Button Manager doesn't offer any options, but does let you know that your drive is on and the Backup buttons are "live"

Drive Performance

Being a USB2 connected drive, the Western Digital Dual Option Back Up Drive has its weaknesses, as drive performance is limited by the USB connection rather than the drive itself. USB drives typically won't perform quite as well as an internal IDE drive in a recent model PC. And USB performance can be affected by the speed of your computer, how many devices you've connected to your USB ports, the types of devices (a USB 1.1 device can slow USB 2 devices connected to the same hub or card), whether or not you are using a hub or USB card with multiple transaction translators (most have a single transaction translator, see this Tom's Hardware article for more information: http://www.tomshardware.com/consumer/20030909/). On the plus side, a USB 2.0 hard drive is usually fast enough to handle most tasks, its portable, affordable, and easy to install.

Benchmark tests with this drive indicate that at its best and on average, it can read and write and write data at about 50-60% of the rate that you would get with a the 7200rpm internal IDE hard drive in your PC. Peak (burst) speeds of your interal drive will be 2-3 times that of this USB drive. But if you have a lot of other USB devices connected to your PC, or if its an old slow PC (like my 750mh Athlon system, for example), performance of this drive could easily be reduced by 50% or more.

I ran benchmark tests (HDTach) to compare this WD drive to other internal and external hard drives that I had access to. HD Tach reports a drive's average read and burst speed, and describes the significance of each as follows:

Burst speed ....isolates the speed of the interface (IDE,SCSI,1394,USB,etc) that the device is attached to. The burst speed is the maximum speed data can be transferred from a device's internal cache memory to the CPU. Burst speeds tend to be important when running more than one device on a single interface – the more available burst speed, the better additional devices will perform

The read speed is intended to determine the maximum read or write speed on the device at various locations....... The average result is usually what you would present to a user as it's the average speed in that zone. While HD Tach does show that the read speed of internal hard drives does vary across a drive, the speed of USB drives does not vary across the drive, since the speed is limited by the USB interface rather than the drive itself.

In addition to this WD drive, the drives I tested included

- An internal 80 gb Seagate Barracuda SATA drive in a Dell 8400 PC
- An internal 120gb 7200rpm Maxtor DiamondMax drive in a Dell 4550 desktop PC

The external Western Digital drive was formatted as a FAT32 drives. The internal drives were NTFS drives.

I also tested the WD Dual Option Back Up Drive connected to a laptop as the only USB device, and to a PC with many other devices to see how other USB devices connected to the same system could affects drive performance.


HD Tach 3 (http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php) is a free hard disk benchmark utility, provided by Simplisoft to test the sequential read, random access and interface burst speeds of just about any kind of drive. HD Tach reported the following values for these drives:

120gb 7200 rpm Maxtor
Burst Speed: 92.1 MB/sec (higher values are better)
Random Access time: 14ms
CPU utilization: 4%
Ave. Read speed: 48.9 MB/sec (higher values are better)

80 gb Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM SATA drive
Burst Speed: 115.5 MB/sec
Random Access time: 12.8ms
CPU utilization: 4%
Ave. Read speed: 48.3 MB/sec

When I connected the Western Digital Dual option drive to a Dell Insiron 9200 laptop, HD Tach reported the following results:

Western Digital Dual Option Back Up Drive, USB 2, Dell Inspiron 9200 laptop, the only USB device connected:
(Typical values based on a half dozen test runs)

Burst Speed: 30-31.1 MB/sec
Random Access time: 15.5ms
CPU utilization: 20%
Ave. Read speed: 29.1 MB/sec

Note that the average read speed is about 60% of that of the internal IDE drives I tested, and the "burst" (peak) read speed of this USB Western Digital drive is not much faster than the average speed, unlike the internal IDE or SATA drives, which are not limited by the USB port.

I then connected the Western Digital USB drive a Dell 4550 desktop PC. Also connected to this PC's USB ports are two printers, a scanner, external cd writer, another external hard drive, a Griffin Radio Shark, a pocket PC docking station, a Zen Micro mp3 player, a mouse, a flash card reader, a wifi router, a Hauppage TV tuner, and more. On this system HD Tach reported speeds about half of what was reported with the laptop, with an average read speed of only 13.8 mb/sec.

Western Digital Dual Option Back Up Drive, USB 2:
Burst Speed: 13.8 MB/sec
Random Access time: 13.8ms
CPU utilization: 18%
Ave. Read speed: 13.4 MB/sec

When I removed everything else from the USB ports and hubs on this PC, HD Tach reported much improved results, showing the average read speed to be about 30.6MB/sec.

In a more "real world" test I tried copying a single large file (a 517mb avi video file) and a directory of small files (257mb, 12500 files) from the WD USB drive to the laptop and to the Dell 4550 desktop. In the best cases, the large avi file could be read and copied in about 23 seconds (almost 25mb/sec). The directory of small files took about 2 1/4 minutes to read and copy (a speed of about 2mb/sec).

When copying files to the Dell 4550 with many other USB devices connected, file transfers were much slower. The 517mb avi file took 57 seconds to copy from the WD USB drive to the desktop. The 257mb directory of 12500 small files took about 10 minutes to copy.

In the real world, for many uses, even the slower times won't matter. I wouldn't use a USB2 drive for editing video files, but for office applications, or playing back video or audio files it works fine. You might also notice from the last test I ran, how much slower this drive (and others) is when reading or writing lots of small files. If you have lots of small files on your PC that you want to back up, it really extends the time required to make a full backup of a drive.

Using the Backup Feature

There are three push buttons on the face of the Western Digital Dual Option Back Up Drive. One is an on-off button, which serves an obvious function. The second is the Manual Backup button, and the third is the Automatic backup button.

The Automatic Backup button launches the Retrospect software on your PC, and allows you to enable and configure Retrospect to make automated backups from your PC to the WD (or other) drives. Once the button is pushed, a wizard opens up, walking you through the automatic backup options, where you select the source and destination for your backup, and set a schedule for when the backups occur.

This Retrospect Wizard only offers two options for which files you backup on a drive, either you can backup everything on your drive, or just your "My Documents" folders. Needless to say, this is not going to be flexible enough for most users.

Fortunately, you can also launch Retrospect from your PC and schedule a backup to run automatically, using the scripting options built into Retrospect. From here you can select individual directories to backup, or choose options (called Selectors) like "all files except cache files" or "applications" or "documents", which Retrospect defines as:

All files: all files on your drive, including Operating system files
All files except cache files: As above, except cache files, which allows you to make quicker backups, without leaving out anything important
Applications: All exe or dll files.
Documents: All files that are not exe or dll files, and not in the operating system folder, and not on the Desktop or in Favorites folders.

Once you chosen a selector, you can go through and edit the selections, adding or deleting directories to backup. I chose the "without cache" files options, and have setup the software to make a backup every nite at 11:30pm.

Pushing the Manual Backup button on the WD Dual Option drive also launches Retrospect on your PC, but unlike the Automatic button, opens a window asking if you want to change your backup options, and then after a few seconds, starts a single, manual, backup of whatever drive you selected.

Retrospect Express offers a few other options and features, if you dig through the menus. You can edit the backup script to keep one, two, five, or seven backup sets. Retrospect makes Progressive backups. That means once a backup set is created, Retrospect updates it by copying over only files that have been added or changed. Unlike other backup programs, you don't select whether to make full or incremental backups, Retrospect does it for you. (Optionally you can tell Retrospect to start over and make a full backup, as eventually progressive backups become too large, keeping files you might have deleted or updated several times)

Retrospect Express is a full featured backup program. Despite the "Express" description, this software offers all the features of the full version except for some networking features and tape drive support. Other features include the ability to create disaster recovery disks, though only for a specific backup set. Backup data can be compressed (though I didn't see much advantage, perhaps reducing file size by 20-25%).

Accessing these options is not nearly as intuitive as I'd like. I don't expect my parents to ever get into the scripting features of this software, even though the scripting process is "wizard driven". They'll likely only use the one button options accessed from the buttons on the drive. But some users will need the other options, like the additional security of keeping multiple automated backups. Those users will likely end up reading the manual more, though.

The WD Dual Option drive can be a little slow, when it first saves a full backup. Making a full backup of my boot drive, containing a little over 20gb of data, took 4 hours, at least when I chose the "all files" option. Choosing the "all files except cache files", reduced the time to a little over two hours, not so much because I reduced the amount of data backed up, but because I eliminated 90% of the small files that were being backed up, saving a lot of time.

Though I've not made a "full restore" from my backup sets, I have restored individual files, without any problems.

SUPPORT

The Western Digital Dual Option Drive comes with a 1 year warranty. FAQ's, downloads and a knowledgebase are available on line. Individual user support is limited, only free support for the first 30 days to resolve installation issues and basic drive issues. Further support to cover beyond 30 days can be purchased for $15, renewable each year for $10.