western digital my book essential edition 1 tb external hard drive

Rating:
Date: 2008-07-03
BEWARE
I purchased a previous version of the My Book series and after having disk corruption twice it died completely after less than 2 years. All data lost. Has Western Digital improved its reliability in these newer drives? I doubt it, and I'm not willing to risk it. A positive review from someone who has only owned the drive a week isn't of much value. Read up on other review sites and discussion forums, there are tons of complaints about Western Digital's drives failing. If I were you I would shop other brands. An unreliable drive is not worth owning no matter what price you get it for.

Rating:
Date: 2008-07-02
Not easy to set up
I bought two of these. It would seem that this would be an easy product to get set up, and it should be. Except that my computer initially would not recognize the drive when plugged into the USB port, and when I later tried to reformat it with NTFS instead of FAT so I could put 4 gig + video files on it, I had a lot of trouble.

In the end, I concluded that the connectors that came with the cables must have not been making good connections initially (perhaps they had some shipping sealant) because the more I used them, the more reliably they worked.

So if you buy these and have trouble as I did, try connecting and unconnecting the cables several times and see if that helps.

Rating:
Date: 2008-07-02
Best bang for the buck drive in the 1TB category
Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 1 TB External Hard Drive

My setup: IMac (w/Intel processor).

I bought this drive about a week back and hooked it up to my computer and right off the bat it found it and I could go ahead and read and write to it. So in that regard, WD did keep their word, this definitely was a plug-and-play thing with the Mac. In addition, the user manual is just a single page - so for all those Mac users (who hate manuals) this embraces the same philosophy.

The first thing I did after buying this was formatting it to HFS (for my Mac) from the default which is Fat32. This is not something that you *need* to do if you have a Mac, but I'd imagine Mac's would work better with HFS than Fat32. Doing this formatting with the Disk Utility on the Mac was a breeze.

The read speeds from the drive are pretty decent - although I'd imagine if you were doing intensive operations such as photo/video editing of files on this external drive you would see some lag. The write speed is ~30-35 Mbps, this is just a tad disappointing since USB 2.0 is supposed to support upto 400 Mbps. Then again, this could be the computer's fault and not this drives.

If you are like me, and plan on using this for back-ups (which will not be that frequent) and would be reading stuff a lot more from this drive than writing to it - then you really can not go wrong with this drive.

Style points: It does look pretty good . Some folks hate the glowing blue lights and feel they are too bright. I beg to disagree. The drive also powers off when the Mac is put on sleep, so the lights do not remain on all the time.

In conclusion, this is a great deal for $200 for a 1TB drive. It would have been perfect with a Firewire option -- hence the 4 stars.

Rating:
Date: 2008-06-25
Good deal
I bought this product when it was sold for under 200. You may be able to find better deals at the price it is at right now. However, for the price I paid I have no complaints. I don't think I realized how large one terabyte really is until I finished loading all my data on to the drive and saw that I still had more than half the drive available. This drive makes very little noise, just a few clicks here and there when scanning for data. It powers on and off with my PC, Macbook Pro, and PS3. It is easily and quickly recognized by all these devices, and has very good read/write speeds for an external usb drive. Like I said, I have no complaints, and that's all I could have asked for.

Rating:
Date: 2008-06-24
1TB USB Hard Drive
This is a great and inexpensive product with lots of storage. The only problem is that its slow to tranfer large amounts of data and large image files are not allowed to transfer to the drive via usb(specially via a usb network hub), but this is normal for usb(2.0). You want faster, go sata/esata. This is a great none the less

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