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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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of HARD DRIVE, 500GB MYBOOK COMBO EXT
Customer Review: Great drive if you don't use it a much.
Summary: 1 Stars
I got my WD My Book Feb '07. I noticed that when I transfer files to it the drive got hot. I have it on a wire rack shelf standing on end, so all three sides could get air flow. There is no fan in the unit and I noticed about July that the drive appeared to not respond and make my apps on Windows lockup when the drive stops communicating. I've tried firewire and USB interfaces. I've tried on other computers. The only thing that seems to help is when I put a small desk fan pointing at the vents. I store my podcasts on the drive but I don't continuously access the drive and yet the drive seems to overheat. I had gotten a 1TB version and it has a fan. I don't use that one very much so it still works ok. The drive (when working) is very fast. Much faster then previous WD external hard drives I use. However, after My Book overheating, I don't think I will be getting another My Book. Especially when other companies have longer warranties. Other then that the drive is quiet and nice to look at. Until the overheating problem, I would have gotten another and I had previously recommended the drive. I did like it was fanless, but I don't know if modern drive can survive without a fan. If my drive is typical of the model, I don't recommend the drive for anything more then to turn on for backup and then power off the drive.Customer Review: Both of Mine Died ...
Summary: 1 Stars
I bought two of these from Amazon a couple of years ago. They were competitively priced, easily set up, and worked fine ... initially. These two are part of the 9 HDs connected to one of my MacBook Pro 17. Both drives worked fine with either USB2 or FireWire connections. One of them started to become flaky several months ago, appearing and disappearing on my desktop for no apparent reason. I didn't have time to monkey with it, so I just backed up all the data onto another drive and shelved it thinking I'll come back to deal with it when I have time. Well, I didn't have time. Now the second drive failed also, before I even had a chance to back up anything.
This struck me as very odd to have both WD MyBook 500 GB HDs die like this (while I had not a single such incident with all my other drives including Seagate, Maxtor, LaCie, and three 2 TB WD). So I finally sat down and started looking at the one just failed with TechTool Pro 4.62 this evening. At this point, it has only scanned 3,347,712 of 976,773,120 blocks and it already found 26338 bad blocks, and the number is increasing quickly. I suspect the other drive had similar problem. Since surface scan takes a long time, I haven't gotten to it yet.
Anyway, this particular model turned out to be very unreliable. Avoid at all cause.
Customer Review: No problem sharing on network
Summary: 4 Stars
I'm rating this 4 stars because I've only started using this drive (but so far I've saved to it Windows system backups for two computers and transferred a total of 55 GB to it). I haven't had any problems. I can't compare it with any other external drives and can't compare its speed with anything else (but both backups were done simultaneously, the 2nd over a wireless connection, while files were also being transferred).
Mainly I wanted to give a different point of view to an earlier review, even though I bought a slightly different model, My Book Essential Edition, which has no software and is limited to a USB connection only (on sale at Best Buy for $200). Someone indicated a problem sharing the drive over the network and attributed this to a Western Digital constraint. This may depend on the type of connection. The comment almost kept me from buying this drive, because I want to be able to access it from my notebook as well as from my desktop, but I don't think the particular brand of a drive can limit standard USB connectivity. Anyway, I don't have any problem sharing the drive over my home network. I'm using Windows XP. (I reformatted the drive from a FAT drive to an NTFS drive to enable larger file sizes, etc., but that has no effect on the ability to share a USB drive.)
Customer Review: $200 paperweight
Summary: 1 Stars
After installing the drive on my windows xp computer, I noticed that it was partitioned as FAT32, which I wanted to change to NTFS. I used windows' disk formatter as per the instructions on manufacturer's website. After reformatting the drive, I wanted to reload the original factory installers and backup program that are bundled on the drive, so I downloaded the original software from WD site, as well as a firmware update. Upon installing the firmware update, the drive became totally inaccessible. I unplugged and replugged the drive into the usb port, and windows recognized it as "Oxford USB Device" and not as a hard drive at all. I emailed WD tech support, only to get a response saying to try the drive on another computer (thanks for the bright idea, moron), which of course doesn't fix things since the firmware is obviously bad now. I now have a $200 paperweight that the company I purchased from via the marketplace thankfully will refund me for.
Upon searching Google, I quickly found that this firmware update problem is quite common amongst these drives. I am only thankful that I found this problem out early, before I backed up any data on this that may have been lost forever. Do not waste your money on this drive, and do not risk your data to this piece of crap.
Customer Review: One day wonder
Summary: 1 Stars
I received this drive from the kids for Christmas. It was one of the things I had asked them for. My intention was to put my hundreds of cds on a drive in a lossless format. I ripped cd's to it on and off that night and the next day. As we left for dinner the day after I inserted another cd. When I returned I found an error message that the drive needed formatting and a stripe down my laptop screen (I don't know that they are related but think they must be). I looked at their website. As I registered the drive I found that their warranty is from the manufacture date and my drive was out of warranty. I searched the site and found no help. I sent a description of my problem to the tech help. I got only automated replies for a couple of weeks. After these stopped I checked on their site a couple of times. The last time I checked It was listed as resolved. I updated the inquiry and finally recieved their answer. Send it to a data recovery facility or reformat it. I have always used WD internal drives in my desktops and have been a fan. I have another external WD drive (not My Book) that I love. For this one I give the drive, The fact that it worked less than a day, the out of warranty when you register it and the tech help site all a giant thumbs down.