Western Digital - 1Tb 7200 Rpm 16Mb Ext Hdd
by Western Digital
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List Price: Our Price: $74.99 You Save: $195.00 (72%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: CE See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Western Digital - 1Tb 7200 Rpm 16Mb Ext Hdd
Customer Review: A bit slow, but couldn't expect more from a USB drive
Summary: 4 Stars
UPDATE 2008-02-05:
Everything has been running fine. This thing is very quiet. I have it sitting in my entertainment center, hooked up to a TViX M4000 as a slave drive. It works great, powers down when the TViX shuts down, comes on when it start up. Absolutely great for what it is.
UPDATE 2007-11-25:
So far so good with replacement drive...
The drive is properly spinning down after periods of inactivity, and it shuts itself off completely when disconnected or when the computer powers down. It appears to be running cool, but it's hard to tell since there's no side of the case that physically touches or sinks heat from the drive. Transfer speeds are about 30-35MB/sec on my machine, not too bad.
Not blazing fast
Doesn't appear to run hot
No power switch (turns itself on/off, spins down drive after inactivity)
USB plug is mini-B
Works well as TViX M4000 slave device
ORIGINAL REVIEW:
Got this home and plugged it into my WinXP SP2 computer. It took about 2 minutes to recognize. Next, formatted it NTFS and filled it with about 500GB of files, overnight. The drive was making some funny noises, like the read heads were resetting, but the speed of the transfer didn't seem affected so it was left to finish. The next morning the transfer was complete, so a verify was started... failed on all the files... windows had problems reading the directories too. Reboot, no help... disconnecting the drive and reconnecting seems to have helped, but who knows what is going on with this thing. Perhaps I got a lemon? Perhaps the USB cable was bad? We'll find out after it's returned. For now, 1 star rating.
Customer Review: VISTA: My Book Essential Edition 1 TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive
Summary: 5 Stars
I have 2 of these 1 TB drives which I purchased about a month ago. I use them with Two Dell Inspiron 1525 with Vista Home Premium, One Acer Travelmate 4150 with XP Home edition and a Western Digital HD media player.
Both units arrived nicely packaged and in working order. They came readily formatted (exFAT) which worked fine for my purposes. If your unit somehow arrives unformatted, (another one of my WD units did!) it's relatively easy to do so to NTFS, which is supposed to be more secure. NTFS works just as well unless you need to hook up a NAS device, then exFAT would be better since all the NTFS permissions would be bothersome. You would recognize it's unformatted easily because your drive won't appear on 'my computer' when you plugged it in. No big deal but I hope Western Digital would be more consistent with all their models. I found a very helpful video on formatting on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JyOPfBgGXs&feature=PlayList&p=A145F67EC71FD5F1&index=5
I've had these on standby, hooked up to my Western Digital WDTV Media Player, almost all the time. The drives run much cooler when compared to my 500GB USB LaCie Hard Drive, Design by F.A. Porsche, which is also by the way, a great product, having survived heavy usage for more than a year.
No file loss or crashes so far (knock on wood) but its always advisable to have a backup. As good as it gets for hard-drives but its never a question of 'if' your drive fails but 'when' so remember to back-up your data. Yes, I would 100% buy Western Digital again..solid product, competitively priced. Enjoy! Hope this helps.
Customer Review: Good value, marginal performance for a USB drive.
Summary: 3 Stars
After researching and owning so many external drives, I tried WD. Here are my thoughts after owning the essential 1TB for six months: (I have a 1TB essential and a few 2TB studio II editions)
PROS:
- Clean looking
- Economical
- Dependable (no major problems thus far)
- These WD My Book units are very quiet, the disks and the fans
CONS:
- Drive sleeps despite power management settings
- Transfer speeds are slow, and not just USB slow
I've seen a few others complain about transfer speeds, and they blame it on USB, which has very little to do with it in my opinion. USB should be able to sustain 40MB/s (480Mb / 8 = 60MB/s, minus overhead gives you 35-45MB/s) and I've even seen more on my LaCie bigger disk, around 48MB/s. This drive gets me 20MB/s at the most, usually 10-15MB/s... this is a problem with the disk or the controller, I'm not sure which.
The drive also goes to sleep every few hours, so it wakes up every time I want to access something from my AppleTV, iTunes, etc... that adds another 10s to access time. It saves power though, so some might see that as a plus. On the downside, in my experience, drives will last longer if you just let them spin for their entire life without powering up/down daily. I have windows set not to let anything sleep, and yet all of my WD drives sleep.
Also, I just bought the WD studio edition II, which offers two disks in a RAID configuration. Very classy lookinge enclosure, 2TB storage, and significantly higher transfer speeds. You get what you pay for...
Customer Review: I Couldn't Imagine a Better Deal for the Money
Summary: 5 Stars
I purchased my Western Digital external hard drive almost two months ago, and so far it has been nothing but a blessing. It couldn't be simpler to install. You just hook up the included USB cable, plug in the power supply and you're good to go. Windows should automatically detect when the drive is plugged in so no trouble there. Although, I will say that the optional AutoBackup and AutoSync software that comes on the drive is both annoying and completely pointless since you have to pay to use it after a 30 day trial. Other than this slight drawback there is nothing else negative I have to say.
The drive is quiet, fast (considering the fact it is USB), and reliable. It doesn't generate much heat, but just to be safe I have placed a small desk fan behind it. I'm hoping this will greatly extend the life of the drive. I also love the blue light on the front of the casing. It blinks when files on the drive are being accessed, and I find this to be a very welcome feature.
My brother bought an Iomega Prestige 1 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive 34275 off of Amazon, and it burned out within two weeks of use. I've been accessing my WD almost 24/7 for the past two months and have not experienced so much as a glitch, much less total drive failure. No telling how long the drive will maintain this level of perfection, but as for now I am totally comfortable stamping it with an A+ rating, especially since it only costs a little over a hundred bucks.
Customer Review: Western Digital MyBook Essential
Summary: 3 Stars
As a hard drive (definition being a portable, reliable storage device) this Western Digital MyBook excels wonderfully. Portable, reliable storage - great casing, wall-wart adapter, and USB 2.0 cable provided. The blue light blinks politely to let you know that your device and your computer are making conversation. The transfer is fast and generally easy.
However, as a package deal, I have to dock some serious points. The software (which is preloaded on the hard drive) is less than exhilarating - in fact it didn't read any of my files, and since I ended up "dragging and dropping" files using a separate window anyhow, I just uninstalled the software from my PC. There is no Auto-Run (apart from the junky software) when you plug this into your PC, so you must navigate to the classic "My Computer" screen and click on your appropriate drive peripheral. Once you've done so, it prompts you with a screen to re-install the Auto-Backup software - Uhm, nope. Sorry. Been there and done that already. So, using a third-party program that opens files in a "my document drag-and-drop" fashion, I right-click, drag, drop, copy, paste, and select my way to storage freedom. Hey - it never fails.
So apart from the flakey software and the absence of a useful start-up screen, I'd say this hard drive does what it was meant to do - save, back-up, and transfer your files in a (for the most part) painless fashion.
If there were a hard drive out there with better software, I would probably opt for that next time. However this will do me just fine for now! :-)