easy to install and fill up | Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 1 TB External Hard Drive

Cheap Space | Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 1 TB External Hard Drive

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	• Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 1 TB External Hard Drive Western Digital Western Digital average customer review:based on 55 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Working good so far!

I purchased this drive last June '08 at a great price! Total plug and play. Formatted it for Mac and started to download files off my computer; it works as said. It is a very silent drive and doesn't seem to heat up. The only thing I don't like is that it is on when the computer is up and only sleeps when the computer is asleep or off. There is no ON/OFF switch and I don't need it on all the time.

easy to install and fill up

I waited over a year to purchase substantial personal external storage, and I have been delighted with the My Book 1TB volume. It was easy to plug and play with my HP tablet, and the transfer rate for files from my hard drive or an external CD/DVD drive has been admirable.....having tons of uncompressed music from the massive CD collection on a single drive has been a low-priority wish for ages, and now I can do it.

My only complaint is the backup and recovery software bundled on the drive that installed on my laptop. It slowed my machine by revving up in the background at start-up, and it's not like I *need* the planned redundancy; so, I uninstalled it after a week. Other than that.... and it's my own fault for letting the apps install... I'm beyond happy with my purchase.

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Cheap Space

For the price, this is a stylish hard drive and has plenty of space for the average person. I have owned 1 previously in the past and another 500 GB and 400 GB home edition from 2006 which are both still running. I am a little scared based on the reviews as to whether this hard drive will go bad quick, however, since I only use this for archiving and rarely remove or replace files, I should hope they will be fine. I recommend it if you are not going to actively use it (that is my purpose for the HD).

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Plug and Play External Drive

I currently have 2 terabytes of storage, 6 do-it-yourself "DIY" external drives housing various sized hard drives, and a MyBook. This review compares their performance. All drives are currently on-line connected to a 7 port USB hub.

In the Box

A black box housing the drive, a brick power supply, and a USB cable are key items. 2 instruction sheets, and a warranty card complete the kit. The My Book is about the size of a bible one finds in hotel and motel rooms.

The drive case, power and cables leave a very clean design. All my DIY drives comes with stands, awkward sized power supplies and cable placements that are not well thought through.

Installation

Simple: Plug the USB cable into the MyBook, and into your PC USB port. Plug in the power supply to AC and the MyBook.

The MyBook has no power switch, and turns itself on/off if the USB port is powered, when the PC is on.

The drive was recognized by WinXPSP2 without a hitch, and re-formatting the drive to NTFS was easy using WinXP built in disk utilities. The drive ships with FAT32 format, which is less desirable if NTFS can be supported. I backuped the shipped "trial" utilities inside the MyBook in case they were useful; they were not, and it was not clear were it was stored: C:\Program Files\Western Digital. I used Western Digital's disk utilities that shipped with my other drives to check partitions and drive status. These programs can also be downloaded free from Western Digital's web site.

Break-in

The drive ran over 1 week for 24/7 for a burn in, and has done a 24 hour long disk encryption format routine. it is currently a month old running 16 hours/day. Its surprisingly silent, and runs cooler than my DIY drives.

USB 2.0 Speed

It has a transfer rate of 10MB/sec. This is not the raw transfer rate, but includes delay from encryption I use. This is about 6x slower than the maximum USB transfer speed of 60 MB/sec but is the same rate as my other DIY drives.

Conclusion:

Excellent bang for buck. The cost to build a DIY external drive today may often be more than buying a pre-made external drive. USB 2.0 transfer speeds suggests the MyBook drive is a decent speed drive. The auto on/off feature is very helpful, given most DIY kits require manual power-down.

Note, there are a number of complaints about the higher end MyBook drives. The simple electronics of the low end 'Essential Edition' maybe the saving grace to this drive's performance, keep this in mind as the display boxes look the same. Further, all drives can malfunction, so a burn-in is a must to insure your drive is not among the few bad eggs.

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Small, simple, elegant, and very easy to use. Just plug it in, and you've got plenty of room to back up and save your valuable data, music, photos, and movies.