Looking for an affordable way to get 3TB?
Coming in the now familiar ‘book’ aesthetic common to Western Digital’s desktop drives, this 3TB monster among the most affordable of the 3TB drives on the market, with a street price of around $239. That’s a great deal for a drive that comes with some very useful software and is one of the best looking desktop drives around.
Like other drives from WD, it comes with SmartWare, which is our favourite bundled backup solution. It’s not as technically capable as either Memeo Instant Backup, which comes with Seagate drives, or the BackItUp Essentials program that comes with Verbatim's, but it’s friendly and does what it needs to do very well. It’s an application that provides continuous backup of your data; whenever you change a file on the source drive, that change is immediately backed up, without the need to set a schedule.
The software allows you to set a full backup, select individual files and folders, or even decide what types of files you’d like to have backed up. You can encrypt your backups and set the number of versions of a given file the backup will retain. It’s logical, simple and fast, which is just the way we like our backup solutions.
Available from WD, retailing for $239.
APC rating: 8/10 (Highly Recommended)