Review: Western Digital Elements Play Multimedia Drive

Western Digital's Elements Play Multimedia Drive is a great device for entertainment junkies. This 1TB drive supports a wide range of files and can play out in full HD at 1080p resolution. It is formatted to support large HD files.

The drive comes with a compact remote and batteries, as well as a USB cable. However, users will have to purchase their own AV cables before outputting media to an external monitor. While most hard drives ship without cables, I would expect a drive that is designed for entertainment to include the required cables.

At just over 1kg, the Elements drive is a bulky one. However, the performance it delivers makes up for this, especially when compared with a smaller, notebook-sized hard drive of similar specifications. The Elements drive really shines in terms of play-out capacity and usability.

The Elements Play Multimedia Drive is a sleek black machine with nicely rounded corners. The smooth, glossy finishes ensure it complements even the most high-end monitors on the market, while the black casing means it fades into the background when media is being played.

The drive comes with a remote control, allowing users to browse and select media from the comfort of their couches. The drive is, however, dependent on the remote. This means users are not able to play media if they lose the control (as I did ... a few times). It's a bit frustrating and an oversight, considering a few buttons on the drive itself would overcome this problem.

The Elements drive ships formatted to NTFS. This format is capable of handling much larger files than FAT32, which limits the size (and therefore quality) of files that can be played. While many drives can be reformatted to NTFS, most consumers are not aware of the difference, so it really is essential that a multimedia drive comes readily formatted to NTFS. The format makes it easy for the not-so-tech-savvy (read: me) to download and play-out HD movies.

The main interface is delightfully simple, with a few folders for video, music and stills. Browsing the drive itself, even when content has been placed outside of the default directories, is as easy as looking through a folder in Windows. There are no complicated menus or settings that need to be configured: simply select your movie or music and hit 'play'.

Thanks to the NTFS format, the Elements drive allows consumers to play large, high-quality HD files at faster speeds than most USB drives will handle. Despite having USB 2.0, as opposed to the faster USB 3.0, transferring full-length HD movies to the drive takes roughly five minutes.

The Elements drive expands on the functionality supported by most USB-enabled TVs and DVD players, supporting a wide range of file formats at very good quality.

I found that the device handled H.264, .mov and .mp4 files from Apple iTunes without a hitch, as were DivX-based AVI files from Windows. Even using the composite RCA output with an older 21-inch television delivers very high quality playback and is a definite improvement over DVD and satellite on the HD-based files.

The quality was excellent when using the drive to output to a newer flat-screen via the HDMI output. The 5.1 Dolby surround sound that is built into the connection also holds the potential for better than Blu-ray quality, depending, of course, on the file formats and their encoding. A good question to ask now is: Where is the average consumer going to find better than Blu-ray quality files?

Even the quality of photo playback is great, making this a good option to show off family or holiday snaps.

The Elements drive is a great addition to the home entertainment suite. Finding legal content for the drive is tricky in SA, which does not have services like Netflix. However, with 1TB of storage, users can back up an ample supply of media, which can be taken along on holidays using minimal space.