Western Digital rolls out My Book drive with eSATA

Western Digital this morning updated one of its flagship personal backup drives with a new interface: the My Book Premium ES Edition supplements the original USB 2.0 with external SATA, raising its theoretical maximum speed to the same 3Gbps of the fastest internal hard drives. The drive can reach burst speeds of 300MB per second versus the 60MB per second limit of USB, its creator claims. Systems attached to the My Book through USB 2.0 in turn get a ring-shaped capacity gauge that lights up as the disk is filled. Every drive also ships with a copy of EMC's Retrospect Express HD for automating backups for both Mac OS X and Windows PCs, both of which can connect through the eSATA port.

The Premium ES Edition is already reaching stores and sells at a price of $179 for a base 320GB version, while its larger-capacity 500GB sibling retails for $229.