Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 500 GB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive WDG1U5000
by Western Digital
|
List Price: Our Price: $199.99 You Save: $130.00 (39%) Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Buy Used: from $69.99 (click here) Category: CE See more product details |
|---|
Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 500 GB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive WDG1U5000
Customer Review: 3 Years and the Case Finally Gave Up
Summary: 4 Stars
A testament to the longevity of the hard drive Western Digital put inside this drive. 3 Years of pretty solid hard use, and the drive still works. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for the case or electronics. Last night the drive quit working after booting up my computer. No coaxing would bring the drive back, front light worked, no drive spin up.
If you google disassemble WD 500Gb My Book, you'll find an instructions on how to remove this case. It's not hard to do, just tricky. Remove the paint or sticker over the screw on the side of the case, press in two tabs at the top and bottom, and the cover slides off (with a lot of coaxing).
Once I had the case open, it was pretty simple to free the WD Caviar drive from the housing. These are SATA drives. Open the computer case, connect power and the SATA cable, a brief driver self install, a reboot, and this drive has a second life as an internal drive.
I fully expect that this drive will last a good long time internally. Simple surgery and the drive has a whole new life.
By the way, this is actually a pretty noisy external drive. Although there is no fan, the drive makes a pretty decent noise while spun up. The reason you recognize it, after around 10 minutes if you don't use the drive, you hear a click, and a whining wind down noise.
These were decent drives at the time. The newer models are way less expensive.
Customer Review: Great external drive
Summary: 4 Stars
I bought this external drive about a week ago and I haven't tested until yesterday and I'm impressed about it. I read almost all the reviews, specifications, pros and cons before buy it, and I was tempted to buy a seagate external drive, but after all I'm satisfied about this one.
Firs of all, I didn't have any troubles for installation. You have to only plug the AC adapter and the USB cable and windows recognize the drive. The software that comes with the drive is optional for you to install it. It doesn't improve the performance neither make it slow so it's up to you install ir or not.
The drive is very quietly y silent when you are working with it. You only see the green light that shows you that is in action even if you transfer a lot of information at once.
The main problem with the drive is that comes pre-formated in FAT32 and if you plan to use it with Windows 2000 or higher, have it in NTFS is mandatory. I took me about 2 and a half hours to format it, of course my PC doesn't have an ultimate generation processor, but it's time that you lose before use your new drive.
Every hard drive, external or internal, eventually fail, so I consider the best thing to do with this kind of drives is for backup and don't depend on it for your favorites applications and extremely importat information. Keep it cool, turn it of when you are not using it and you will extend its life and keep your data safe.
Customer Review: GREAT add to my home office! MASSIVE STORAGE
Summary: 5 Stars
Not only does this external hard drive look great on my desk it add a ton of storage to my system, allowing me to do backups on a regular basis without issue and allowing me to keep movies and other files that don't need to be on my main PC accessible from a hard drive that doesn't allows need to be running.
The large ring lights up a nice mild green letting you know the device is on. In the center of that ring is a large button that you use to turn your external hard drive on and off without having to unplug it (this has to be one of the best features). I can leave it hooked to my computer and only turn it on when I need it to be on. This will save those of you out there who like to leave your home PC running all the time. You don't have to worry about this hard drive being subject to crashing due to being on all the time and don't have to hassle with unplugging it.
Western Digital makes pretty good hard drives and they last a long time without issue. I got a heck of a deal on mine from a friend but was quite pleased with all the features it turned out to have. Like the built in backup utility as well as the fact all you have to do it hook up 2 wires and it's ready to run (power and USB). Plus the fact that it looks good on my desk, looks like a black hard case book. Doesn't attract more attention to it self like other externals on the market do. Transfers seem to be rather fast as well.
Customer Review: 4 and a half stars.
Summary: 4 Stars
I also have the Western Digital My Book Premium Drive 500gb and when it was time to add more space I decided that I didn't need Firewire/400 and backup software. Even though they look like the same drive physically, the "Essential" drive looks cheaper. Probably because of the lack of Firewire port, the essential is slightly smaller in volume. The Premium edition had nice a nice hard feel and rubber footing around the edges of the top, back and bottom of the unit. However, with the essential, there's only 2 rubber footing on the bottom, thus it just feels cheaper than the premium.
With that in mind, I think it's still a better value than the premium, since you're getting the same storage, you save 40-50 bucks by not having Firewire and backup software.
Performance-wise, my 2 mybooks have been performing just dandy. I've only had the essential for a couple of weeks, the premium one I've had for I think about 8 months. I use it to backup all my video, music and photos and it's a solid performer. I transport them back and forth and only turn on the unit when I save data off my main powerhouse windows computer, then I use the drives to access my files off my Apple laptop at my loft.
They do come with small power bricks, but overall I like the black design, it goes nice with my PC but doesn't look that great next to my powerbook.
Customer Review: Causes windows lockup in XP and in Vista
Summary: 1 Stars
I had this drive connected for months without any issues. I backed up over 200GB of information from my XP desktop to this drive. I Added this to a Belkin USB network hub to give my girlfriend access to back up her XP laptop. She also had no issues using the drive through the USB hub. I purchased a new Vista Ultimate laptop and tried to access the drive and it would see the drive and allow me to explore the drive, but once I start moving/copying/using any files, it locks up my new Vista PC. Western Digital tells me that this needs to be reformatted for Vista. They confirmed that my GFs XP laptop would be fine with the new format.
I proceeded to move all the information off the MyBook to the old XP PC and to USB keys to empty the drive. I reformatted with the Vista laptop and moved everything back onto the MyBook. Now, neither the Vista laptop nor the XP laptop or the XP desktop can view the drive without locking up. I now have data on a drive that I cannot access. WD gave me the info free of charge 3 weeks ago, but now they are telling me that I need to PAY for their tech support to solve a problem for a solution that they gave me.
Paying for tech support is beyond offensive. This is not a broken, this is a tech support issue. If you can't support your hardware, you don't deserve any customers; and you've lost one here.