HARD DRIVE, 500GB MYBOOK COMBO EXT
by WESTERN DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES
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List Price: Category: CE See more product details |
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Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of HARD DRIVE, 500GB MYBOOK COMBO EXT
Customer Review: Great Hard Drive, Childishly Crude Software
Summary: 4 Stars
I did a good amount of research before I bought the Western Digital drive. I was attracted by its large capacity and positive review that I saw on Amazon and other sites.
The reviews were correct as far as my experince--the drive has massive capacity, works well and was simple to install. It's USB plug-and-play, so I should say that I plugged it in and it installed itself.
I gave it 4 stars because I was disappointed with the software. The interface is frustrating. It does full and differential back-ups of my user files just fine when I tell it to do so manually. But, as far as I can tell, the scheduling feature simply doesn't work. I've printed the scanty four-page manual and followed the trivial steps closely several times and even tried a few of my own. Nothing. The scheduled times show up just as the manual says. However, it has never run yet at a scheduled time.
Customer Review: So easy...So much space...All You Need
Summary: 5 Stars
I first used a product similar to this when editing video for a grad school project. My portable DVD camcorder couldn't connect straight to the computers; so the department said, "Use this".
Years later, I needed to back up my main computer. Having suffered through one hard drive meltdown I vowed never to not back up again. Was burning DVD-RWs but couldn't manage to keep the number of discs needed down to less than 20.
Enter the Mybook. Connecting this to my computer was as simple as "Power Cord, USB Cord, Done" The computer recognized it, and then it loaded the software. I switched to a Firewire cable for my initial backup (faster transfer times) and then used the USB 2.0 connection for my routine backups. The MyBook sits on my desk; and quietly makes sure I'll never lose any of my data again.
I have no cons for this device. It works like a charm.
Customer Review: causes trouble
Summary: 2 Stars
This drive has ended up being more trouble than it's worth. It' works ok *most* of the time, but when I was on XP the drive would randomly suddenly pretend to windows that it has no files (easily gets you scared). Disconnecting the drive and reconnecting it fixes temporaly. Also sometimes the harddisk never sleeps, and stays spinning at a high-rate all the time, unless unplugged from the machine.
I recently upgraded to a new vista machine, and hoped that the issues with the drive would cease, but now I just get blue-screens complaining about usb or ieee power management. I've definitely pinned this down to the drive, as i never get this issue with it plugged in.
All in all, I recommend staying away from this drive. As soon as I can I'll be buying a replacement and copying all my data from this drive to the new one, as I no longer trust this drive holding my data.
Customer Review: Failed during initial format, I don't trust this product line :-(
Summary: 1 Stars
I was really enthused about this drive. However, the lack of a physical on/off power switch seemed a little bizarre when I took it out of the packaging. It came up FAT32 and I wanted compressed NTFS so I fired up disk management under Windows and started up the format. At about 5% the format "finished", it said the drive was RAW but there really wasn't a drive there. The blue lights were on. I went to re-format it and it wouldn't format. I tried to activate the partition and Windows said "unexpected error", please restart. I plugged it into another computer and it wouldn't recognize it as a hard drive. I power cycled the first machine, plugged it in, no blue light, doesn't recognize it as a hard drive. I am returning this and will not trust my data to any Western Digital "My Book" product. Good concept, very flawed execution. Don't trust your data to this product line.Customer Review: GREAT EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE
Summary: 5 Stars
I purchased this unit after looking at many 500gb external hard drives. In addition to liking Western Digital's reputation, I liked the fact of having both the Firewire and USB 2 connections on the drive. The drive was formatted as one large FAT32 partition. XP users, like me, would want it formatted as a NTFS drive, which required re-formatting. But, before you reformat, be sure to copy the WD directory on the drive to your hard drive so you don't lose it! The reformatting took an hour or so. Once that was done I ran the Firewire driver included in the WD directory and then plugged it into my system. The system recognized it easily and the drive was ready for backups.
Using the Firewire connection I backed up over 19GB of data in less than 40 minutes. While it is not the fastest drive, it is plenty fast enough for most of us. Recommend this drive highly!