Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 500 GB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive WDG1U5000 by Western Digital
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Digital camera reviews of Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 500 GB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive WDG1U5000
Digital camera Review: A terrific value
Summary: 5 Stars
As is typical of Western Digital HDD's, you just plug it in and it's up, running and ready to use - seriously, any idiot can do it. Really, it takes longer to unpack it and find a place to put it, that it does to start using it after plugging it in. I do have a gripe, and it's not just aimed at Western Digital: why do these HDD manufacturers continue to ship these drives formatted with FAT32? I would hazard a wild guess that probably more than 95% of people that buy these things are using an XP (or equivalent) system (and I'm sure that some upset win98se user will rebut me on this). But seriously, if you're using XP, it's almost a necessity that the drive be reformatted to the NTFS file system. Not a terribly difficult task, but you need to know how to do it; either from the Computer Management Console or a Command Prompt. But this is a minor gripe. This is a terrific drive for the price. Is 1,000GB (1TB?) just around the corner?Digital camera Review: Absolute Junk!
Summary: 1 Stars
Product failed after 16 months of light use. Would have been about 1,000 man hours of work lost if I had not had a second backup drive. Would not recommend.Digital camera Review: Affordable storage solution
Summary: 5 Stars
A good choice especially considering the price at which it is being offered.
I had heard that its somewhat noisy - so far nothing of that sort. Hope it continues so!
Digital camera Review: Almost like eating a steak without a knife and fork
Summary: 5 Stars
...it's half a tear-a-bite!
This is a very good value for the money. I have had this for a month, running for prolonged periods. I have had no trouble. I'm very pleased with this purchase.
Digital camera Review: Awesome External Drive!
Summary: 4 Stars
I purchased this hard drive at Staples after a co-worker bought one (he loves it).
First Drive I purchased: Plugged it in, reformatted to NTFS and did an Error-Check which came back perfect. Soon as I started copying data over the drive deleted my data right after copying giving me "Mysong.mp3 not found." ???? The drive then started disappearing and reappearing. I went to the Disk Manager (XP Control Panel --> Admin Tools --> Computer Management) and saw that the disk was unreadable and reappearing as a 32MB drive. After a second format and having the same results - I decided to returned the drive. Staples took it without question and gave me a new one.
Second Drive: Formatted to NTFS again and started copying my data over. No data problems and the drive has 20+GB on it. The drive is going strong and acting 100% normal.
My Review: A+ external drive. Extremely quiet - I cannot hear it over my computer's CPU fans - even while transferring data. The drive is extremely light making it a plus because I'll be hauling this to work everyday. The My Book is VERY cool to the touch (unlike my other 300GB external drive I put together with an external kit). The green light in front lets you know when data is being transferred (it isn't a button).
Specs:
Has 465GB of usable space (Fat32 format).
Give Windows XP about 35 seconds to discover the drive when you first plug it in.
Don't install the software - just choose: No Action and format the drive to NTFS.
Took about 17 minutes to copy 20 GB (VERY fast for USB 2.0).
I give it 4 stars out of 5 for the first drive that failed. I guess I'm one of the lucky ones :).