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: Video Editing and Then Some
Summary: 4 Stars
Among other things, this External Hard Drive has been a very useful tool for editing Videos, Photos and Audio between four different PC's. I do some hobby videography and audio/video transfer, so I need quite a bit of HDD space to keep the projects rolling along smoothly. I mainly use this drive to back-up my working files and previous projects should I need to revisit them, but it also works great for on-the-go editing on either my wife's new laptop or my old one. I primarily use the Firewire 400 cable because it's supposed to be faster. I haven't really taken the time to compare Firewire vs. USB speeds, but Firewire seems to be only minimally faster than the USB. This could be a driver issue or simply the hardware I'm using, but either way I'm satisfied with the performance of this drive. Editing directly from the drive is smooth and reliable, I haven't noticed any lags in performance compared to editing on an internal drive. The only time I feel impatient is when I'm transferring or backing-up multiple 15 GB + sized files. Those are good times to take a break and let this little machine plug away at it's own work.Customer Review: Mine works with powerstrip
Summary: 5 Stars
I was scared when I read that this drive does not work with powerstrip. But I went ahead and opened the box anyway and plugged mybook into a powerstrip. It worked!! I also tried to plug it into UPS, and it worked on UPS too. Mine was bought from CC.
Another nice feature of this drive is that the drive spins down after a period of inactivity. I think it spin down after about 10 minutes. Ofcourse if powers off when you put your computer on standby, as advertised. The spin down feature was very important for me since I plan to use this drive on SimpleShare NAS (Network Attached Storage). The drive inside SimpleShare has capacity to spin down on it's own but SimpleShare cannot spin down USB drives attached to it. By the way, for the nossy ones: I plan to use MyBook with SimpleShare as RAID 1 (Mirrored) drive. No more manual backups for me.
Mind you everyone using external USB drives: If the drive does not spin down and keeps spinning all the time then you are going to see a dead drive in 1-2 years with all your precious data lost.
Other features are very well reviewd by fellow users.
Customer Review: Very good product , great value
Summary: 4 Stars
First ,at 0.50/GB this is (currently) one of the least expensive external HDs
It is a 7200rpm western digital, a solid product overall, no problemes with it after 2 month of use, comes with mac and windows software that autoinstall when you plug the drive.
the overall performance is good.
The backup software that comes with the drive is excellent and allows you to schedule backups or do an ad-hoc backup of the files you choose, and the extract utility included in the backup gives you the option to do a full or partial restore.
There are a coule of minors problems, the ring that supposed to show the percentage of the disc that is full does not work, I tried all the options and looked for people with this problem online, but could not find a solution; the second one was already mentioned in another review...the drive does not work at all when connected to a power strip, or cable extender, I have no idea why , but the computer does not recognize it, if you connect it to a wall outlet it works fine.
If you can live with this issues , I highly reccomend this product.
Customer Review: Tomorrow I Will Drag This Disk Down the Road Behind My Truck
Summary: 1 Stars
What else can be said about this clinker of a drive? What I can say is that I've used computers with hard drives since the early 1980s, and have never had a drive that played the kinds of tricks this drive has played on me.
Tonight (as it has done so often) the drive refused to "wake up" from its frozen state (sleeping?) when I tried to copy a file onto it from my main drive. Of course the Finder becomes unhappy when it tries to copy to a drive that refuses to wake up...resulting in the spinning beach ball of death...which refuses to go away...nothing will unfeeze matters until a hard shutdown mercifully ends the lockup.
Of course when that happens, there's always a worry of file corruption on every other disk attached to the system. Bleccccccchhhhhhhhh.
That's it! No more! This drive is uplugged from my system and will never be used again. Maybe I'll tie it to the back bumper of my truck and drag it down the road behind me just for fun.
Do not buy this drive. Probably a good idea to not buy *any* drive made by Western Digital. Junk.
Customer Review: Initial Connection, Reconnection Problems
Summary: 3 Stars
I'd only recommend these drives if you find them at a really good sale price, and if you are technically inclined enough to do your own troubleshooting. The included backup software isn't worth spending extra money for. Bought two drives on sale about three weeks ago. Both appear to be working okay now but had some problems with drives not being properly recognized at first. Also had problems with system crashing when I followed instructions to first turn off the drive's power button, but now seems to work okay as long as I first use Windows XP's "Safely Remove Hardware" icon at the bottom of the screen. The included Retrospect backup software also has drawback of creating one huge proprietary format backup file which can create problems if you need to transfer or restore onto a new or replacement system that doesn't have same backup software installed - kind of defeats the whole purpose of having external backup drives. I just copied all the files first using Windows Explorer, then used free version of SyncBack to let me do comparisons and incremental backup with a normal file system.