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: Buyer Beware!
Summary: 1 Stars
I wish I read the reviews before... With data you really want function over form!
I generally don't make a habit of leaving reviews. However, I was so disappointed with this product that I was motivated to do this. In any case, look at the distribution of the reviews. On one side, a of people love it and give it 5 stars (113 at the time of this writing). *However*, a lot of people hate it (72 at the time of this writing). Well, add me to the latter. My WD MyBook crapped out after a few months (less than 4). I haven't contacted WD, I'm going to take it to a Memory Recovering place, and that'll be the end of it (along with my desire of buying future WD products). Don't say you weren't warned (73 people have taken the time to put it in writing, don't be #74).
Cheers,
-FZ
Digital camera 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.
Digital camera Review: Cheap storage and easy to use!
Summary: 4 Stars
I bought this drive a week ago for $110 and think it's a great value. At $0.22/gig, it's relatively cheap storage, although still nowhere in the ballpark of home-burned DVDs, where a 4.7 gig disc costs approximately $0.25 per piece (or about $0.05/gig). Of course, the home-burned DVDs are not reliable for long-term storage and aren't always practical for archieving media that you want instant access to. I'm backing up everything on both formats (DVD and my new WD external HDD). Truly critical media (wedding photos, video of baby's first steps, etc.) are backed up on duplicate DVD's and/or my computer's main internal hard drive. Neither format (DVD or HDD) is going to last forever, but hopefully my redundancy will prevent me from loosing any media.
As for the drive itself, I'm very happy with its performance. It runs quietly, other than the sweet creaky/frog/cricket sound of any HDD. It was 100% plug-and-play on my Windows XP (SP2) home system. It took me maybe 45 seconds from the time I plugged it in until I was writing data. I chose not to install the optional Google software yet. Until I upgrade around the holidays, my system is a dinosaur and I don't want to give up any computing power for background indexing.
Speed would probably be my only criticism at this point. If you're reading or writing a lot of data at once, it can drag using USB 2.0. I haven't clocked it with any precision, but I'd estimate a write speed of about 30-50 gig/hour - with me using other applications while it writes in the background. I looked into other drives with firewire, eSATA, etc., but for my purposes, price was more important than speed. I'm not dumping huge quantities of data at once, and once it's on there, it's for archieving purposes, so I don't need to be accessing it regularly. When it fills up, I'll buy another.
Those who gave this HDD bad marks either had unrealistic expectations (if you want more than USB 2.0 speed, be prepared to pay 50-100% more) or had this drive fail on them. Eventually, if my drive fails (I should say when, as no HDD lasts forever), I'll be unhappy too, but I haven't owned this drive long enough to comment on its long-term reliability relative to other HDD's out there.
It's not "blazing fast" and it won't last forever (nothing will, even magnetic tape, which I consider the best long-term storage media, but who wants to deal with tape?!). But if you're looking for a cheap and extremely easy backup solution, I would highly recommend this drive!
Joe Sirbak
Digital camera Review: Compatibility with Windows Vista64
Summary: 3 Stars
For me that wanted an External disk to work with this OS it has been worthless. But if that's not your case, you may buy it. Regarding other
aspects is a good hardware.
Digital camera Review: Corrupt Drive on Western Digital for the 2nd time!
Summary: 1 Stars
I own 6 WD My Book External Drives and 2 of the 6 have failed in less than 2 years. If you are storing critical data, find another solution.