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: Terribly Unstable Product with Poor Service
Summary: 1 Stars
This external harddrive crashed and became completely, irrepably damaged when I unplugged the USB cord while the computer was on. I was unable to reformat the device and lost all of the videos that I had initially put on the drive. As there was no file transfer or other action occurring between the drive and my computer at the time, there is absolutely NO reason that this should have occurred if the device had been well designed. Unfortuantely, it was not.
There is also no warning on the box or in the packaging that this can occur, and the technical support guy I talked to said that this is a common problem and that complete failure of the device can occur, as happened in my case. WD would not take the product back as a return; fortunately J&R would, but I still had to pay over $11 to ship the product back. This is the only thing I have ever had to return from an Amazon order, and I am very disappointed with the poor quality, support, and shipping charge that occurred as a result of this product.
Customer Review: Extremely simple to set up
Summary: 5 Stars
After a distressing hard drive failure a couple of years ago, I've been hyper about backups (and backups of my backups...) for home data. I recently purchased this to backup my music and photo files and so far it's been great. It is extremely easy to set up; you plug it in, load the software, ask it to update your music and photo files, and off it goes. For me, the first backup of 80GB of music and photos took about 90 minutes.
It's also an extremely rugged piece -- a nice solid metal case that is heavy enough to stay put on your desktop (I have an older, lighter firewire drive that is always getting pushed around...this WD drive is definitely going to stay put where it is).
The only thing I don't like about it is that the documentation is pretty skimpy, and the WD website didn't seem to have a lot about this hard drive on it. I guess if I have no problems with it I won't miss the documentation, but I would feel better if there were a little more information readily available.
Customer Review: Great backup device for the Solo law firm.
Summary: 5 Stars
I've been looking for a product to back up my extensive client law files for several months and didn't feel comfortable with most. Finally, I stumbled across this little jewel through microsoft's marketplace and decided this looked promising. It arrived in a few days and within 45 minutes, my files were fully backedup, set for auto backups in the background, never interferes with other programing or computer operations. It's excellent and trouble free and easy to operate. I couldn't be happier and I know my client's files are safe should my computer crash. For those who ask, "But what about a fire? Then what are you going to do since this device will be destroyed, presumably so anyway." Well, the answer is: have a DVD burner and make a back up of those files which are absolutely the "crown jewels" and keep a set of DVD's at some other location, your house, bank safe deposit box, etc.?
As far this product, you won't go wrong. It works great. Love it.
Bernie the Attorney in Tulsa
Customer Review: The good and bad with a Mac
Summary: 2 Stars
I bought one a while back to be used with my Imac. I picked this because they had this auto on and off feature.
The good: depending how you position it is makes very little noise. They include both firewire and usb cable.
The bad: The auto on and off feature works only with USB. I played a lot with it but it never switches off when connected via firewire. In the end this didn't bother me too much so I bought a 2nd one hoping to use my 2nd firewire port or daisychain both drives which should work per WD website. However as the drives share the same firewire ID the mac can not handle this and will not recognize the drives when both are connected. So I ended up with one drive on my USB port, switching on and off automatically and the other connected via firewire always beeing on. Daah.
So my recommendation if you are using a Mac is do not bother to pay extra for firewire even though it seems to be a tad quicker then the USB connection and spend the money on a USB hub.
Customer Review: Reliable premium performer!!
Summary: 5 Stars
The WD premium 500gb harddisk is compact, has a good amount of storage space, is fast and reliable. It has a nominal 7,200 RPM speed and 16mb buffer. Noise/ heat emanating from the unit is low. There is a handy AUTO sleep/ wakeup feature.
The difference between this and the Essential edition is the FireWire 400 and capacity guage in the Premium edition.
However, as many others have mentioned before, the inner blue ring meant to be the Capacity Gauge gets a lot of background light from the outer ring, and hence its function is still in doubt for me.
But, considering performance, reliability and storage-this is a great drive to archive files-for students, professionals and home users alike.
This unit isn't small enough for travel use though. So, I use a 120gb WD Passport for that. The real difference is the USB powerup in the passport (but slower R/W speed) vs the Power cord in the MyBook (with higher transfer speeds.)