Western Digital WDG1SU5000 My Book Premium ES Edition 500 GB USB/eSATA External Hard Drive by Western Digital
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Digital camera reviews of Western Digital WDG1SU5000 My Book Premium ES Edition 500 GB USB/eSATA External Hard Drive
Digital camera Review: A Good Price, But Be Careful...
Summary: 3 Stars
This drive will probably work fine on most windows systems. It did not on mine. (I'm running XP on an older IBM computer, using an accessory Adaptec USB 2.0 IDE card to connect to high-speed USB devices.)
Plug-and-Play did not work for this drive. After hours of struggling to make the computer "see" the drive, increasingly frustrated, cursing WD and about to return it, I found a small troubleshooting note buried deep in WD's support web site saying that it was incompatible with certain Adaptec USB cards. Naturally mine was one of them. Oh, well hey -- they should have put that on a bright red warning label on the outside of the box.
I ended up installing an additional USB 2.0 card (IOGear brand, thank you) that I needed anyway, and then the WD hard drive worked fine immediately. If you're using an eSATA connection you shouldn't have this problem, but I haven't tried it.
The drive has a low, resonant hum when it's on, always there but not too annoying. The circular blue lights on the front swirl around when the drive is being accessed, cute but unnecessary... a standard little blinking LED would do fine. The button on the front is *not* an on/off button (What is it with drive manufacturers who don't put on/off buttons on their hardware? Would that be so hard?) In fact, when your press the button the blue lights just swirl around some more and then come back on, nothing seems to change. Even though it's supposed to be a "safe power-down" button, apparently you have to have the proprietary driver installed to get it to work. Likewise, the inner concentric ring is supposed to show disk usage percentage, but doesn't without the driver. The drive is not smart enough to do these things on its own. I am against adding anything silly and unnecessary to my system so I haven't installed that driver or the free backup software that came with it.
Note to Western Digital: Very pretty, very clever. But in the future perhaps skip the cleverness, go with simple and functional, and make sure your hardware is compatible. I have two other external hard drives, a Maxtor and a SimpleTech, not to mention a half dozen other USB devices, and they all work fine with the Adaptec USB2.0 IDE card. Do you think I'm going to buy another WD hard drive? NOT.
Digital camera Review: Works great
Summary: 5 Stars
I initially bought a SimpleTech SimpleShare 500Gb drive. Copying the files on the network took forever and on the second day there was some serious knocking which lead to a total crash of the drive. I decided to switch back to a USB HDD . . . the research lead me to this WD MyBook hard drive. It is a very quiet device, great speed, great looking too. I love it.Digital camera Review: Check what's in the box before using :(
Summary: 2 Stars
I bought this drive from a local Best Buy today. Got it home and plugged it in to my 3 month old Dell laptop. The drive came up as UNFORMATTED. I got out the user manual (not much there) and it stated the drive is formatted as FAT32 and contained a number of drivers and utilities.
I started to format and it said 372GB available when it should have been something around 470GB (for a raw 500G drive). I canceled the format process, cause this was very suspicious for a brand new drive.
I opened the drive tools and found out the drive model/type under Windows XP came up as something like:
WD 4000G
I Googled the drive model and it came up as 400GB !! I then looked at the model number on the case of this drive and it also said something like WDG1U4000 which to me means 400GB drive.
So somewhere along the line, Western Digital put an unformatted 400G drive into this box that was supposed to be a 500GB FORMATTED drive. Either that or someone switched the drive (??) in the box and returned it to Best Buy.
When I tried to return it 2 hours after I bought it, the store manager at Best Buy gave me the complete runaround and told me that I'd have to deal directly with Western Digital and wouldn't refund my $, saying it's my problem. After arguing with him and BB customer service, the best he would do is a gift card for the $ instead of a complete refund. BB would not honor their return policy as was written right there in big letters saying, "This is an exception to the return policy." My days of buying at BB are pretty much over after being treated like it was my fault. They will be hearing from me.
So the bottom line on this particular drive (buyer beware), please check the the drive is indeed a 500G, not a 400G and the model number on the case says something like WD1U5000, not WD1U4000 like mine did. The box did say WDG1SU5000.