Western Digital My Book Essential 500 GB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive
by Western Digital
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Our Price: $143.49 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $69.00 (click here) 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 Western Digital My Book Essential 500 GB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive
Customer Review: Beware of Heat
Summary: 3 Stars
I just bought this version of My Book. I had the previous version (with the circular light.) It died after about two years, but my poor usage probably shortened its life. I had a computer crash about four months ago and the little program that powered down the drive on shutdown was not reintalled. This meant the drive was on continoulsy for four months. The drive was also placed horizontally (it had rubber feet on two sides). The new dirve has rubber feet on only one side, so you place it vertically. Perhaps the horizontal position makes the drive run hotter. The new drive doesn't need a small program to power it down, it shuts off when the computer is turned off.
Heat is the issue with all of the these drives, because fans are noisy and add cost users simply will not buy a product that is superior.
I have placed the drive on two short wood sticks so that more air can flow through the device. (The bottom vents are sort of blocked.) I hope this will lengthen the life.
The instructions are also not the best. (I use karen's Replicator for backup and not their poor choice.)
I bought the device again, because I would rather deal with the devil I know rather than the devil I do not know.
Customer Review: same problem as others had
Summary: 2 Stars
Like everyone else who complained about this product, I had it for about a year now and then suddenly I could not access any data on it.
Symptom looked like this: The drive made a clicking sound, Windows XP could see the drive when USB is plugged in, but could not access the data on it.
The chassis mechanicals were put together in an awkward manner, so it was not easy for me to take it apart. I finally took out the hard drive from inside, installed it into my computer main chassis as a secondary hard drive. Powered it up, and saw the XP operating system detected the new drive and did a scan on it, it then fixed a file system inconsistency error found, and then booted into Windows XP on the computer's primary drive.
The XP could then see and access this secondary drive, and looked like all my data were there. But the plastic chassis was sort of ruined when I opened it, so I'll keep it as an additional secondary internal hard drive. Had it been easier to take the drive out, I could have still used it as an external. Oh well, I am just glad that I didn't lose the data.
Other people who had the same symptom may want to check and see if this would rescue their data.
Customer Review: Sleep mode makes drive a boat anchor on your system.
Summary: 1 Stars
Here's the problem. This drive goes into sleep mode after 20 minutes of inactivity on the drive.
So I am working on my computer, I load up my image editing software and the software - which used to load in seconds - checks all the drives connected to the system.
This wakes the WD MY BOOK up from its sleep. Which takes about as long as I take to wake up in the morning - or so it seems.
Then after an eternity (in CPU cycles) it wakes up and my software continues loading.
Ok, so you don't edit images? Click on "My Computer" It will show a list of all your hard drives. WAIT FOR THE WD MYBOOK to wake up...
NOW you see them.
This hard drive basically slows your entire system to a crawl while it waits for the drive to wakeup every time it is in sleep mode. The net effect is to drastically decrease the usability of your entire computer.
And can you turn it off? Not that I've found. It just shuts down after 20 minutes of inactivity (the external hard drive - not your computer) so that any time you need to access it, or worse - anytime your computer THINKS it needs to access the My Book, you WAIT and WAIT and WAIT.
Customer Review: Nice until it failed.
Summary: 2 Stars
On the plus side, the drive is easy to set up (plug it in), reasonably attractive and the price was acceptable. On the down side, the enclosure itself failed fairly quickly. The case is rather annoying to open-I actually had to use Google to find out the trick to doing so. Rather than go through the hassle of getting a replacement, I bought a fairly low-priced enclosure and put the scavenged hard drive in that. I've had no problems since. Interestingly, the delicate hard drive proved far more reliable than the case.
Based on my experience with buying a drive in an enclosure and just buying a drive and a low priced enclosure, I would recommend the DYI option. If you can use a screwdriver, then you can install a drive in an enclosure. The enclosures are generally easy to set up (read the reviews, though-some can be rather crappy) and you can just swap out a failed drive easily (or remove a working drive from a failed case).
I've had generally good experiences with Western Digital hard drives and continue to buy them despite the failure of the MyBook I bought.
Customer Review: Learn from the mistakes of others
Summary: 1 Stars
My WD MyBook 500GB lived for just over a year (just long enough for the warranty to expire) before beginning a slow decline toward total death. Luckily I had time to get my files off in time. Admittedly, my experience is with the version 1 of this drive and so you may cling to the hope that the new version 2 drives will be better, but consider this... how long is the warranty on the new version? Still one year. So if the people who make it have no confidence that their drives will last much more than a year, then should you trust your data to that same drive?
Look through these reviews at the number of us who have had our drives fail with only a year or so of use and learn from our mistakes. Don't trust your data to a drive that isn't warrantied for at least 3 years. It's not so much about the warranty itself; it's what the length of warranty tells you about the quality the manufacturer designed into the product. In an industry where a 3-5 year warranty is the standard, I should have recognized the one-year warranty on this as the red flag it is. So should you.