Western Digital WDG1C5000N My Book Premium Edition 500 GB USB 2.0/Firewire External Hard Drive
I had this 500GB MyBook up and running about 60 seconds out of the box. Took me longer to push the plug into my UPS than the computer took to mount it as a drive!
For compatibility reasons the drives all come formatted in FAT32. To use for video editing, which is why I bought it, I had to re-format it to NTSF. the reformat that took only a minute or two and I was off and running.
Great drive, brainlessly simple to install and use.
Sorry I can't comment on the backup software but I only use this for Video and photo and I have an NAS for all backup.
I use the drive as a storage place for my media and such and I haven't had a problem yet. I keep it in an underventilated place, and it never gets very hot. The only way I know it's on is by looking at it, can't hear a thing. My laptop doesn't have a firewire port, so I use a PCMCIA firewire card and it works fine. I'm completely satisfied with it. This refers to the 320Gb version, but it's all WD baby. I wish I knew they had a 500Gb version for $50 more than I paid for mine. Live and learn.
As the earlier reviews mentioned it is easy to use and the documentation is only 2 pages. It works fine for media files but it isn't very good for backing up the OS or programs files. The software although easy to use is a bit sloppy. During a backup if it finds a file it doesn't like for one reason or another it kills the entire backup and you have to hunt down the "bad" file and fix or remove it. After 5 days of trying to get a 40GB backup I've had to resort to moving them folder by folder. It also will not work if you don't have XP service pack 1 installed. You may want to consider a spare HD, external case and a main stream backup software program.
I'll make this review quick and dirty.
It's extremely quiet, very fast, looks good, takes up very little space, easy to install and use, and holds a ton of stuff. I use it exclusively to hold my photos( up to a couple thousand so far). I shoot mainly in RAW so they're all large files. Of course the price is right, under a buck per gig.
This unit is the ticket. Look no further. Buy it.
After a distressing hard drive failure a couple of years ago, I've been hyper about backups (and backups of my backups...) for home data. I recently purchased this to backup my music and photo files and so far it's been great. It is extremely easy to set up; you plug it in, load the software, ask it to update your music and photo files, and off it goes. For me, the first backup of 80GB of music and photos took about 90 minutes.
It's also an extremely rugged piece -- a nice solid metal case that is heavy enough to stay put on your desktop (I have an older, lighter firewire drive that is always getting pushed around...this WD drive is definitely going to stay put where it is).
The only thing I don't like about it is that the documentation is pretty skimpy, and the WD website didn't seem to have a lot about this hard drive on it. I guess if I have no problems with it I won't miss the documentation, but I would feel better if there were a little more information readily available.
I use this drive as a backup on my Mac. Periodically I take it out of the closet and attach it to my Mac through the Firewire port. I copy everything from my Mac hard drive to the WD 500, then I turn it off and put it away.
BTW, I reformatted it for the Macintosh to improve speed and reliability.
No Problems. No Muss. No Fuss. Works exactly as expected.
WD's My Book was worth the purchase. Small, quiet and fast. It has two Firewire ports and one USB port and comes with one of each types of cable. I bought mine so I could back up all my important files from my Mac but I ended up using it to backup the entire contents of my hard drive using the enclosed backup software. The program was easy to understand and works great on OSX Tiger. I can't vouch for how it works on a PC, I try not to use them if I don't have to! The only thing I don't like about the drive is that it can get pretty warm, but that was after an hour or two of backing up my entire hard drive, so that is probably to be expected. I checked out a bunch of other external firewire drives on Amazon and Apple's websites before I decided on this one and I'm pretty happy with My Book.
I now have two of these(1 250g & 1 500g) and they are great!!
if you want to add space to your computer without hassle,
get one of these!!!
I have two of these. Both installed in my Gateway XP Pro system without any problems. I don't use them heavily, but, so far so good ...
The very first thing that got my eye when considering to purchase the WD is that I'd no longer need to make back-ups on disc. Now I don't!. The book does the job of over a 100 DVDs and all your data is in one attractive looking book shaped storage unit. I use windows xp which acknowledges immediately when another piece of hardware is detected. Once XP sees the unit plugged up be it firewire or usb, it tells you and ask if you want to install the WD software which is on the WD itself. You don't have to unless you really what to see the extra bells and whistle. If you don't install the software the WD appears like a new drive seen from your windows explorer folder. You can create a new folder as easy as you would in XP... then either drag or copy your valuable data to your new folder in the WD... I plan on getting a couple more. It is a sturdy compact piece of machinery that the average person would mistake for a book. In fact I keep my on my bookshelf with my books. So for me if you're running XP this is the way to go. The only way I could see this product getting better is that they'd increase the hard drive size. But for now the 500 GB is excellent for my needs. Good job Western Digital! I think you've found your strength!
Be VERY aware that this comes formatted was FAT32; if you're planning on storing files larges than 4G you'll need to reformat to NTFS.
Other than that little annoyance, the product is great.
I have had two of these crash in one week, losing all my data. The drive seems to freeze when it warms up. While Western Digital's support quickly replaces the drives (with remanufactured drives) they are not helpful at all with fixing your existing drive. It's very disconcerting to hear them say "Yep, it's no good. Go ahead and reformat." I have had a Maxon external for two years without any problems. I will not be buying another Western Digital.
I'm rating this 4 stars because I've only started using this drive (but so far I've saved to it Windows system backups for two computers and transferred a total of 55 GB to it). I haven't had any problems. I can't compare it with any other external drives and can't compare its speed with anything else (but both backups were done simultaneously, the 2nd over a wireless connection, while files were also being transferred).
Mainly I wanted to give a different point of view to an earlier review, even though I bought a slightly different model, My Book Essential Edition, which has no software and is limited to a USB connection only (on sale at Best Buy for $200). Someone indicated a problem sharing the drive over the network and attributed this to a Western Digital constraint. This may depend on the type of connection. The comment almost kept me from buying this drive, because I want to be able to access it from my notebook as well as from my desktop, but I don't think the particular brand of a drive can limit standard USB connectivity. Anyway, I don't have any problem sharing the drive over my home network. I'm using Windows XP. (I reformatted the drive from a FAT drive to an NTFS drive to enable larger file sizes, etc., but that has no effect on the ability to share a USB drive.)
I was initially drawn to the My Book from Western Digital because of the size, price, and footprint. Unfortunately, I hadn't researched enough reviews from previous owners.
After bringing the drive home, I plugged it into the computer and it loaded right up. I downloaded 6 or 7 gigs of important documents onto it, and went to bed. The next day it turned on once more, and then never again. After numerous e-mails to their tech department, I have yet to get a response.
If the previous reviewer is right, (and I'm afraid he is), I'll be lucky to get a replacement, and have no chance of getting my data back. With what I've lost, it is the most expensive piece of computer equipment I've ever bought.
i advice you to buy this product if you need a huge storage.
Thanks
I tried this drive on two different computers using two different USB cables but neither computer would detect it. I finally called Western Digital and they advised me to plug it directly into a wall outlet, not a power bar. I did, and it worked, but in my case it was a fatal flaw as the only wall outlet in my work area is buried behind a heavy desk, and both receptacles are already in use. I can't understand how it could even make a difference whether it's plugged into the wall or a power bar, but apparently it does since WD said it's a known problem. This seems like a limiting factor on the drive's versatility and portability, and I also worry about how reliable it will be if it's so sensitive to such a basic detail as the type of power outlet.
I was scared when I read that this drive does not work with powerstrip. But I went ahead and opened the box anyway and plugged mybook into a powerstrip. It worked!! I also tried to plug it into UPS, and it worked on UPS too. Mine was bought from CC.
Another nice feature of this drive is that the drive spins down after a period of inactivity. I think it spin down after about 10 minutes. Ofcourse if powers off when you put your computer on standby, as advertised. The spin down feature was very important for me since I plan to use this drive on SimpleShare NAS (Network Attached Storage). The drive inside SimpleShare has capacity to spin down on it's own but SimpleShare cannot spin down USB drives attached to it. By the way, for the nossy ones: I plan to use MyBook with SimpleShare as RAID 1 (Mirrored) drive. No more manual backups for me.
Mind you everyone using external USB drives: If the drive does not spin down and keeps spinning all the time then you are going to see a dead drive in 1-2 years with all your precious data lost.
Other features are very well reviewd by fellow users.
This review is from the perspective of a Mac user. I am guessing that, for the most part, this is good product for PC users... but I think there are some things that Mac users need to know before they purchase. Things that Western Digital fails to mention in their product descriptions, and even in their user manuals.
Let me begin by saying, this product says it is Mac compatible, but it is obviously designed mainly for PC. Also, the user manual is an obsolute joke. It is only a few pages and fails to go beyond basic install instructions. If, for whatever reason, the automatic install they brag so much about in their product descriptions doesn't work as advertised (it didn't for me!), expect to be on the phone with customer service.
1. First thing I noticed was that on the box (in fine print) it says that the Google software that comes with the drive does not run on Macs. I was unable to locate anywhere where this information is provided pre-order. Okay, that kinda sucks, but it's not really a deal breaker, so I went ahead and opened up the box.
2. Regardless of your OS, the drive won't work properly if it is plugged into a power strip, so your going to have to keep a power outlet open for just this single device. This is just kinda sketchy to begin with, but it also makes plugging it in at your work station that much more difficult. (Not mentioned in user manual)
3. Nowhere will you be informed that the drive is, in fact, not "plug and play" for at least some Macs... In fact I believe it specifically goes out of it's way to imply to be "plug and play" for both operating systems. I thought this was great as I would be able to use the drive to transport my files conveniently from computer to computer (including from my Mac to PCs). This is not true. First of all, on Macs the drive will not be "plug and play" at all. You will need to reformat the drive with disk utility before it will even appear on the desktop (Even though in the directions it claims it will appear automatically after being plugged in and fails to even mention the possibility this won't happen). Once you have reformatted, you will only be able to use the drive on other Macs. Now maybe some of you are saying, "You idiot! Everyone knows that you can't use a hard drive on two different OS!" Well, in my opinion, the description of this product ommits an explanation of the true nature of its OS compatibility, at best.... and at worst, it uses intentionally misleading language.
4. Finally, there was no way for me to know any of this if I hadn't opened the box. This is the important part... If you open the box, Western Digital will absolutely refuse to provide even a partial refund.
Am I saying not to buy this product? No... What I am saying is that Mac users need to be aware that this product is not quite as Mac compatible as Western Digital claims.
Mac users beware...
I've been using this drive for about a month now. BUY IT! I don't know if there are some defective drives out there or what but several of the negative claims sounded very odd to me. The first thing I did when I got the drive was to plug it into a power strip.. It came right up.
Next, since I'm running a home network with several computers and a wireless laptop, I shared out the drive on my network. It worked like a champ. I can read and write data to it without a problem. Here are the steps you should use to properly share a drive in Windows XP:
1. On the computer you're sharing, open My Computer.
2. Right-click the hard drive you want to share and choose Sharing and Security from the shortcut menu that appears.
The Sharing tab appears, displaying a message that warns you that sharing a drive isn't a good idea. Beneath the message is a link that you can click to indicate that you understand the risk but want to share the drive. Then the Sharing tab changes to reveal the options that allow you to share the drive.
3. Select the Share This Folder on the Network option.
4. Enter a name for the share.
5. Select the Allow Network Users to Change My Files option.
If you don't select this option, network users can view files but can't create new files or modify existing files. Because you're a network user when you want to work on a file on this computer from a different computer, there's not much point in restricting what network users can do. However, the security in Windows XP is rather complicated, and it gets more complicated when you share folders.
6. Click OK.
Now, to access your new share on another computer you'll need two pieces of info: the name of your computer with the drive and the name of the share you just created. To find your computer name, right click on "My Computer" and choose Properties. Click on the "Computer Name" tab. In the middle of the page you'll see "Full computer name:" followed by your full computer name. If there is a dot after the computer name, you can ignore it. Write down your computer name and the name of the share you just created and head over to one of your network machines that you'd like to access the drive on.
Right click on "My Computer" and choose "Map Network Drive". A window with two fields will come up "Drive" and Folder" and a check box "Reconnect at logon".
In the Drive box, pick the drive letter you want the drive to have in My Computer. In the folder box, type the following using the name of your computer with the drive and the name of the share you created:
\\computername\sharename
Where computername is the computer you hooked up the shared mybook to and sharename is the name of the share you created.
If you want the computer to automatically reconnect to the share every time it reboots, you can check the reconnect at logon box.
Just click Finish and you're done!
Now, back to the My Book 500gb Premium Edition. I find it to be very quiet and unobtrusive. It has two blue rings around the power button that light up. The outside ring is a power and drive activity light that will flash and move when you are reading or writing data to the drive. The inside ring is actually a drive capacity light that tells you how much room is left on the drive! If your drive is half full, the half of the inside ring will be lit!
The center of the two rings is a power button. It shuts the drive completely off. One thing to note on this: when using the included backup software, you can (and should) schedule your backups to run automatically at regular times. If you power off the drive by pushing the middle power button, the drive cannot power itself back up automatically to complete your backup.
I have found that you don't really need to power off the drive anyway as it will slow itself down and go to a standby mode if it isn't accessed for a long time. The power stays on and the blue rings stay lit, but it does go into a power save mode. It will wake back up right away when you want to access it.
The drive also monitors the pc and knows when you turn off your computer. It automatically turns itself off when your pc is off and back on when your pc is turned back on! This is actually a big deal as most of the "do it yourself" external drive kits have a hard power button and the thing will be on until you manually turn it off.
There are 3 different flavors of this drive. The Essential Edition pretty much comes with the drive with USB connectivity and that's it. This works fine for a lot of people.
The Premium Edition comes with the drive, USB and Firewire connectivity and software for your computer including a backup program that is so easy that your grand parents can use it as well as google desktop search to help you find files on your computer just as easy as googling things on the web.
The Pro Edition is identical to the Premium except that it comes with a faster Firewire port for those who need it and it is white instead of black (Probably to match Apple Computers since those are the most likely ones to use a faster Firewire port).
I find that the drive does not get hot at all. If you put your hand on the vents on the top of the drive it will be warm, but that's it. I'm not worried about heat build up on this drive.
Installation:
The software that is included in the Premium Edition is actually on the hard drive itself and once you attach the drive to the computer and power it on, the drive will be recognized and installed by windows and the software install screen will usually pop up automatically. If for some reason this doesn't come up automatically, you can open My Computer, click on the new drive letter and click on the "autorun" file. This should make the software run. Just follow a basic simple install choosing whether you want to install the backup software and google optional pieces and your done.
As for speed, I haven't done any scientific benchmarks, but I've copied a few 4 gig test files back and forth and I'm quite happy with the speed.
In conclusion, the drive works, requires no maintenance, setup is a breeze and it looks cool on top of it all. Also, people complained that you can't plug it into a power strip, I did not have that problem, people said you can't network it, I was able to network it easily.
One more note. People need to realize the tech support terminology can be misleading. When you call tech support and say you're having trouble networking the my book drive, if they tell you that networking is not supported, that does NOT mean that you can't do it, it just means that tech support doesn't think that is a problem with the drive so they won't spend the time to tell you how to do it. If you are trying to figure out how to do something try doing a search with google or A9.com like "how to share a drive in windows xp". You'd be suprised at the things you'll learn!
We're using this to hold our music collection for iTunes with our old Mac G4 tower, and transfer of files and accessibility was (and is) fast and smooth. Yes, you do have to format the drive for Mac OS using Disk Utility in the Utilities folder, and the lame backup software that this comes with isn't Mac compatible, but Backup by Apple is a far more elegant solution, anyways! Don't hesitate if you need a lot of storage, and don't be discouraged because some of it's 'features' are just sales gimmicks. This hard drive is quiet, sleeps when it's supposed to, and is fast enough for most applications.
I know there have been a few negative reviews for this drive from Mac users. I'm a Mac user and my experience is this drive works perfectly for me. Yes, I can plug it into a power strip and it works (why wouldn't it?)
The drive is really quiet so I don't mind it being on. This is unlike my LaCie drive (it uses a 120GB Western Digital) which is quite noisy. I also absolutely love the design of this WD drive--very compact and unobtrusive.
For Mac uses using the latest versions of OS X, first copy the Mac versions of the WD software to another drive, then reformat it as Mac OS Extended Journal. Then install the WD software.
This drive works wonderfully!
The drive has one important problem. When a PowerMac G5 goes to sleep the drive, connected by Firewire, loses contact. When the Mac wakes a dialog box appears saying that a device has been improperly removed. Since there is no on-off switch on the drive, it is necessary to unplug-replug it. (It doesn't appear to have this problem when connected by USB.) Western Digital does not seem to have implemented Firewire so that it is wholly compatible with Apple products.
Update: Other people are reporting sleep problems with these drives, but resetting the PMU on the Mac seems to have fixed it for me. However, the drive too frequently goes to sleep, and there is no way to control this. It is annoying waiting for the drive to waken.
Second update: The drive problem has resurfaced with Apple's update to 10.4.9. I'm also having fatal problems with Western Digital's Passport drive. Beware this company's current drives with Macs.
Amazon is the only place for me to buy anything online. I am very happy with my Western Digital My Book Premium 500 GB External Hard Drive with Dual Interface .
Thanks a lot.
Nishant
500 GB of storage that's fast and easy to use. And for almost 50 cents per Gigabyte? What's not to like about that? I like the fact that it givves you BOTH a firewire and USB cable too!
I'm an amateur photographer shooting .raw with a canon 20d and use this harddrive not only to back up my computers harddrive, but also to store all of my images and my photoshop files to keep my main cpu running clean, and it works great. Its very simple to use and transfer files to the HD and the autoupdate is very simple and works great. For its size, its a great deal, at less than a dollar per GB, and its never given me any problem, just sits quietly on my desk. The only con is in transfering large image files it can take a few minutes, but this only happens to me because of the large file size (18mb) of .raw images. Otherwise, I'd recommend this, and any other WD external hd to anyone.
5 stars.
It seems there are only two kinds of reviews for external hard drives. Good because they work, and terrible because they crash and lose data. Mine works fine - Apple interface is easy and fast. Everything is cool -so far. Unit is the size of a robust paperback so I consider it fairly portable.
This is an excelent product, very fast, a lot of comunications options. Very quiet, low temperature, but the software!, it realy does not work, because you can only compile the backups, and the format compiled you can not recover it with out the software. Is better to use Genie Backyup manager, because you have a lot of option for the backup and you can access and recover all files with any maching having or not the backp software.
Than's for that i gave it only 4 starts.
good lcuk
This is by far the best External I have ever had. It is extremely fast, and very durable. I am currently deployed in Iraq, and this is the only drive that has been able to "keep up". Its sturdy design, and easy to use features have been outstanding. It is a very good bargain as well... Look no further! This is the one to choose....
First ,at 0.50/GB this is (currently) one of the least expensive external HDs
It is a 7200rpm western digital, a solid product overall, no problemes with it after 2 month of use, comes with mac and windows software that autoinstall when you plug the drive.
the overall performance is good.
The backup software that comes with the drive is excellent and allows you to schedule backups or do an ad-hoc backup of the files you choose, and the extract utility included in the backup gives you the option to do a full or partial restore.
There are a coule of minors problems, the ring that supposed to show the percentage of the disc that is full does not work, I tried all the options and looked for people with this problem online, but could not find a solution; the second one was already mentioned in another review...the drive does not work at all when connected to a power strip, or cable extender, I have no idea why , but the computer does not recognize it, if you connect it to a wall outlet it works fine.
If you can live with this issues , I highly reccomend this product.
I bought this hard drive about three weeks ago. It was working fine until about a couple of days ago it decided not to be recognized. I unplugged it, rebooted it, rebooted my laptop, connected it to another PC, connected it to another Mac, used the firewire interface, and it wouldn't be recognized by any of the machines! Then a half hour later, i tried again and it worked fine...With the exception of this strange behaviour (which I hope won't repeat) it's a good purchase well worth the price.
I'd read reviews all over the net and this seemed to fit my needs for a reliable external drive to go with the lappy...particularly given the WD name. I was wrong, wrong, wrong. This drive is garbage.
Worked fine for a few months and then became unstable. On/off button won't work, drive won't even spin up sometimes, have to unplug power and plug it in during a reboot to get it to work. What a waste.
I'm tranferring all my client files to another drive before I lose them completely. One thing's for certain, I'm furious.
My best guess is that when the ambient room temp is above 76F it just goes south, despite being in a well ventilated area.
The WD premium 500gb harddisk is compact, has a good amount of storage space, is fast and reliable. It has a nominal 7,200 RPM speed and 16mb buffer. Noise/ heat emanating from the unit is low. There is a handy AUTO sleep/ wakeup feature.
The difference between this and the Essential edition is the FireWire 400 and capacity guage in the Premium edition.
However, as many others have mentioned before, the inner blue ring meant to be the Capacity Gauge gets a lot of background light from the outer ring, and hence its function is still in doubt for me.
But, considering performance, reliability and storage-this is a great drive to archive files-for students, professionals and home users alike.
This unit isn't small enough for travel use though. So, I use a 120gb WD Passport for that. The real difference is the USB powerup in the passport (but slower R/W speed) vs the Power cord in the MyBook (with higher transfer speeds.)
The advertising for this drive would have you believe this is a plug and play hard drive. I had no reason to disbelieve that. I have an older 100 GB external drive from Western Digital, with plug and play installation, and that served me well for years. I leave my old drive plugged into the wall and the computer, and just use the power switch to turn it on when needed. Easy!
Well, I tried for a couple hours to get the computer to recognize my new MyBook. My computer wouldn't recognize the MyBook with USB or Firewire. (Indeed, the Firewire installation directions simply say to install via USB first, and then magically "install via Firewire," while providing no help at all.) I finally encountered some help on line. The MyBook is very finicky about how you attach it. You can't leave it hooked up to the computer - a huge hassle to those of use that have computers in locations where access to the FireWire and USB ports on the back is not easy. You have to first plug in power, then plug in the data cable to the drive, then to the computer, in that precise order. And you must remove the device in Windows, every time, in order to have your computer see the drive next time.
OK, so my computer saw the drive in USB. No joy with FireWire. Not after hours of trying. I finally discover (in part from a good review below) that Western Digital shipped a bunch of these with defective FireWire cables that might actually damage the bus. It might have been nice if WD had recalled the units with defective cables rather than leaving them out there for people to buy. I got a new cable from the computer store, and as if by magic, my computer could see the drive via FireWire -- but only via the two connectors on the card I hadn't used before. The defective cable fried one of the three connectors. Thanks, Western Digital. At least it works fine now that I know how to baby it to life via one of the two remaining connectors.
Next time I'm trying a Seagate.
I'd only recommend these drives if you find them at a really good sale price, and if you are technically inclined enough to do your own troubleshooting. The included backup software isn't worth spending extra money for. Bought two drives on sale about three weeks ago. Both appear to be working okay now but had some problems with drives not being properly recognized at first. Also had problems with system crashing when I followed instructions to first turn off the drive's power button, but now seems to work okay as long as I first use Windows XP's "Safely Remove Hardware" icon at the bottom of the screen. The included Retrospect backup software also has drawback of creating one huge proprietary format backup file which can create problems if you need to transfer or restore onto a new or replacement system that doesn't have same backup software installed - kind of defeats the whole purpose of having external backup drives. I just copied all the files first using Windows Explorer, then used free version of SyncBack to let me do comparisons and incremental backup with a normal file system.
This is the first WD drive I have used.
It worked right out of the box.
The only issue I had was that it was a FAT32 partition.
Easy enough to fix, but would of prefered NTFS.
Western Digital My Book Premium 500 GB External Hard Drive with Dual Interface ( WDG1C5000N )This is the second of these drives I've bought. I picked up the first one six months ago, and it has worked flawlessly since then. No issues whatsoever. Runs quietly. The LED on the front is handy to let you know when the drive is being accessed. Double interface and simple exterior design. Used for artwork and lossless music files, in combination with a music server. Recommended.
The drive itself performs just fine for what I'm using it for, which is mostly multi-media storage. The drive comes with USB or Firewire options and includes a cable for both. HOWEVER, many of the FireWire cables have a flaw and will not work as it certainly did not for me. WD will have a link on their website when you register the drive to request a replacement cable. I figured easy enough.
I received an email stating that the replacement cable was sent on the 1st of May. I waited and waited and after nearly 3 weeks, still no cable. I was using the drive with USB so wasn't in a huge rush about the cable. I used their web customer service request page to ask about the cable and whether they could verify my cable was sent and to provide a tracking number. A few days later I had received nothing from them so went to the web page to check there for an update. The query was updated to an "escalated" status, but that was it. I figured they were checking into it and gave them some more time. After another few days of hearing nothing, I updated the issue again. Needless to say, after 31 days and a few updates by me to the support request, they have not contacted me nor have they sent my cable.
The drive itself is perfectly fine otherwise, even over USB. I'm able to capture HDV content from my camcorder to it perfectly, render large video files using Sony Vegas etc. It's quick and responsive and am generally happy with the drive.
The customer service department on the other hand.. not so much. Yes, I could call them and spend the time on the phone with them. For such a basic request like this though, it should have been less hassle for both me and them to work through the email request.
I've always had great success with the WD drives in the past, but this level of customer service is just horrible and certainily not what I would expect for such a simple issue. When I get my next external drive, I would likely choose one of their competitors.
I was very disappointed with this hard drive when I received it. It has a huge amount of storage space but the seek time is very slow. I have an off-brand hard drive which has a much faster seek time but not as reliable. Overall the WD hard drive is reliable, but there are definately better choices out there.
Hmm.. good stuff. Firewire interface is faster though. you get about 32mb/s with that and 20mb/s over USB. So always use the firewire where possible. unfortunately though, you can't have it plugged into two computers at the same time (through any combination of any of the 3 interfaces). It would just connect to whichever one is plugged in last successfully. (i've gotten it too seemingly appear to show up and 2 pc's at once but it was just windows taking long to disconnect it from the 2nd computer).
It cause some noise if you put it on a hard wooden table though so you might want to put it on a mousepad or book or some other vibration absorber to prevent that low hum it generates. The HD accoustics however isn't nearly as audibile so its really quiet indeed.
if you really write/read performance from an external interface get the highest edition with the e-sata port. i haven't actually tried it but it's supposed to be faster. I think the drives inside these cases might be a WD Cavier 7200 though and those peak at around 60MB/s read speed.
to recap just realise that you can't plug it into 2 computers at the same time. hope they fix that in future models. -1 star because of that
use the firewire port where possible.
I like the My Book, but I am having problems with it shutting down automatically when turning off my computer. Other than that I like the product.
I first used a product similar to this when editing video for a grad school project. My portable DVD camcorder couldn't connect straight to the computers; so the department said, "Use this".
Years later, I needed to back up my main computer. Having suffered through one hard drive meltdown I vowed never to not back up again. Was burning DVD-RWs but couldn't manage to keep the number of discs needed down to less than 20.
Enter the Mybook. Connecting this to my computer was as simple as "Power Cord, USB Cord, Done" The computer recognized it, and then it loaded the software. I switched to a Firewire cable for my initial backup (faster transfer times) and then used the USB 2.0 connection for my routine backups. The MyBook sits on my desk; and quietly makes sure I'll never lose any of my data again.
I have no cons for this device. It works like a charm.
not any louder than the 250 gig.
love it.
never had a problem with this one or the 250
running both on my macbook
The Westren Digital 500 gig External HD is about the size of your average bible, and at an afordable price you absolutely can't go wrong.Western Digital My Book Premium 500 GB External Hard Drive with Dual Interface ( WDG1C5000N )
FINNALLY!MORE THAN ENOUGH SPACE!! Works perfectly. The only problem i have with it though is that my data transfers alot faster when i use the USB port than the Firewire.-_- I don't know, maybe that is just with me...Otherwise A MUST HAVE!! Great for storing your Videos, Programs, Documents, anything you can think of so as to free up space on your PC. Right now i am seriously considering on buying another one! But with more space!! ^_^ Western Digital is awesome!
The hard drive was a simple installation, plug and play, except on my desktop computer. Customer service has been working on the problem, however, to date it is serving another computer. If it is eventually installed on my computer the rating would be 5 stars. Otherwise....1 star!
I've always had backup drives inside my computer, this was my first foray into an external one, figured I'd get the most out of my new Airport Extreme N router. A cool aspect is having the ability to access files on my hard drive from anywhere one could get an internet connection by hooking it up to my Airport's USB. As far as moving files, be forewarned that USB 2 is slooow, it does come with vastly superior Firewire 400 is a bit faster, if you're looking to move files fast as possible go with the WD MyBook that has the Firewire 800, which if you're a Mac user most have that connection port, most do, if you're a PC user, well, you clearly have your own issues to deal with, lots of them, but are used to doing things slowly so it may not be an issue with you.
The one disappointment I have with this drive is WD's backup software isn't as robust, stable, or able as software other hard drives bundle like Retrospect, Backup, et. al. It's a nice attempt but in practice it's clunky, slow, and vaguely impractical. They should stick to bundling the software from another company that's been in the business longer.
It's fairly small, relatively quiet, doesn't get too hot, and does it's job... can't complain.
Purchased from AMAZON.
When I opened a box, It packed up very well as new.
But when I checked MY BOOK, I can tell it is used item.
It has little scratches next to the button.
It looks like returned item and I got that.
It is working good. But I hope it is okay.
Actually, I thought so much to buy this one for a day.
but now i'm happy after buy this one.
Because i don't feel uncomfortable during use this one.
this one has simple design and i can have a lot of space. !!
This 500Gb external drive is great for the person that has never replaced
a hard drive before.
It's easy to hook up and can work with any computer with a 2.0 USB port
or firewire connection.
The one thing I have found is it upsets or makes the shutdown of
Windows XP hang and sometimes not shutdown completely requiring
a hard reboot to get it to shut down.
I would say this happens 1 out of 25 shutdowns so I can live with having
this problem and gaining the large 500Gb drive.
If you have the know how to install an internal drive, I say do that.
For ease of use, this is very much for the novice.
Worked perfectly first time, dual voltage and comes with some simple backup software that installs off the hard disk.
I'm really pleased with this external hdd, I got it from amazon at an excellent price, the shipping and delivery time was ok. I bought this external hdd looking for extra space, to backup my pictures, music and movies.So far my extra space needs are accomplished and I'm happy with this hdd.
PROs:
a. it have a stylish and modern look (it's terrific in my desk)
b. plenty room, 500 gb it's enough space for my needs
c. quiet hdd
d. It comes with WD backup software. I haven't try it, cause I have another backup software, but if you don't have it, it's a good plus.
CONs:
It's pre formatted with FAT32, it's necessary to format it with NTFS
This thing is great but I just wish it came with some back up software. I ended up using Ghost which works fine, but for the price it works great.
I originally bought this drive to use for storing large video files from family home movies. I found that, unlike other external drives, Western Digital has taken it upon themselves to make installation as lengthy and frustrating as possible, with absolutely ZERO support.
First, you can't just plug in the FireWire and have the drive work. In WinXP systems, you first have to plug in the USB cable and then have the drive autostart its own installation. Well, OK, I can see that. I did this for my laptop and it works fine. Now, here is the big problem. I wanted to transfer over a few hundred gigs of video files from my desktop's archive to the MyBook so I could edit them on my laptop...but when I plugged the USB 2.0 cable into my desktop, the drive DID NOT AUTORUN any installation software! Windows searched in vain for an appropriate driver and then couldn't install it. So I went to WD's support site and got the entire installation software package and manually installed all of them. Then I restarted and plugged in the USB cable.
NOTHING HAPPENED. The drive was unrecognizable. I tried the FireWire next, after checking in Device Management that the controlling software was OK, which it was. NOTHING. After three hours of trying to get this drive to be seen, I quit and just went out and bought a simpler drive. My Apricorn 250GB EZ BUS DT HI-SPEED USB 2 ( EZ-BUS-DT-250 ) works like a USB flash key in that it simply IDs itself as a disk drive and you can transfer files no swat. THIS THING, though, has some other mode of operation that makes it impossible to use with anything other than the first system you install it on.
WD's support is zero and their knowledge base is uninformative. I would never buy another MyBook again and I would recommend that others don't, as well, until WD increases the level and expertise of their tech support.
Please don't tell Al Gore how much power this thing uses just to illuminate the fancy blue circles on the front of the drive.
I've had no problems at all (aside from falling asleep with the bright blue glow filling my room). Of course, I immediately removed the pre-installed software and reformatted to NTFS.
You might want to buy some sort of rubber isolation pad to put under the drive if you intend to place it on your desk or work table. It vibrates noticeably.
I have been using this drive for 5 months and recently upgraded my computer to Windows Vista. As a result of the Windows upgrade, this product just lost half its value for me. The drive works fine physically, but the included backup software will not work with Vista when I try to schedule an overnight backup; the software refuses to recognize that you have selected files for backup and refuses to move past that point of the scheduling. As others have noticed here, Western Digital offers ZERO support for its software - I cannot even find an indication that they recognize there is a problem.
It crashed the first time while loading some data and never worked again. I had to send back. It has been a few weeks and I have not received a working one yet.
I've often wondered how many people review things on amazon when they first buy them. Had I done so, i'd have posted only the good, and would have forgotten by the time it got really bad.
The good:
When I first purchased 2 of these, my first run to a customer went fantastically well. I copied the files via windows explorer to the drive, which showed up in My Computer under windows, as you'd expect, and presto, no problems.
The bad:
- Sometimes the drive won't turn off by the power button on the front. Sometimes it will. It's like my 2 year old child. It's got an unreasonable and emotionally uncontrollable reaction to what you do.
- Customer support is crazy. Crazy! I spent a long long time explaining my problem, what i'd done to solve it, the steps I took and provided a screen shot - only to wait a day and get an automated response - which had nothing to do with the problem, and i'd already reviewed prior to submitting the question because they force you to - and the "person" who responded proceeded to provide feedback and steps that did not address the issue, solve the problem or leave me with the impression that he understood what he was doing.
- The first backup performed with their software took overnight - that's fine, it really was 300GB of uncompressed data on a windows drive - but when it was done, it wasn't - their backup software puts it's own "restore" binaries in the directory you created at backup time - and for this one, it didn't. It seems the backup software is unable to backup when you input over 50GB of data at a go. The workaround, though, is to break it up into smaller chunks. PITA when you have a system for "filing" within your windows directories, but livable considering the bigger PITA to backup to DVD :)
- The drive makes not so nice sounds when shutting down. Yes, it's a known "issue" - they say it's not an issue, but when you shell out a lot of money on your drive, your heart stops for a moment when you hear a painful clicking sound. You know, the sound your drive makes a day or two before it stops working. Yup, it's that one. For what it's worth, i've had the drives on for roughly a month without a problem - but you should be aware that it'll be a little strange the first time you hear it.
The really bad:
- The backup software refuses to work. The problem I have is that it wasn't predictable in how it chose to .. stop working. I installed the drive, did a backup. That overnight backup. Which failed. The next morning I did the backup in smaller chunks and when i came back from work, sure enough it was fine. Great. I performed more backups over the course of a week. No problems. Last week I launched the software, selected the folders i wanted to backup, even selected the files - and the software insists on telling me "Please select the files to be backed up". Nothing changes this message. I'd removed the drivers/software, rebooted, reinstalled, uninstalled just the backup software, reinstalled - it doesn't matter - it just simply refuses to work.
- The diagnostic tool that their website and their techical support people will tell you to use is useless. When you launch it, it does a SmartScan - which, if things are fine, it says "Pass" and you think "great". The problem is when it says "Info unavailable" - what does that mean? You check the help files, right? There's nothing in there that mentions what it means - or mentions it at all. So I reviewed the responses I got from technical support - which provided me a link - and the information in the link simply reiterated their software help info - which was useless. I'm a self service junkie. I don't want to call you. I don't want to email you. If I have a problem, I want to read the manual, or your website, or your forum. While I don't really believe i'm the first to have a problem with their backup software, I absolutely refuse to believe i must have been the first one to ask what "info unavailable" means. Help me help you help me! :)
I think for me the issue is now trust. I think the data on the HD is fine - but considering the application stopped working out of the blue - who's to say the application in each directory I made a backup of on this drive won't stop working too? It works today, but there's no telling if it'll work tomorrow. Yes, I could manually copy the files - but when you're backing up 2TB of data, incremental backups really are the way to go. Another potential workaround is to purchase another vendor's backup software. Which i've done, and not yet tried - but this is wholly not the point. Don't shlep cheap and buggy software off, charge $25 more than the version of the product without it, and market it as "backup software that provides the world in gold" - that's just wrong. And frustrating.
As a result, I won't be buying this drive again. I highly recommend you don't either. There are plenty of competing products on the market already, and if you're going to buy someone else's backup software - you might as well buy a hard drive from a vendor that invests in competent online and software support. After all, as of today, what were you spending that extra $25 on?
Man this baby is smooth...I will never buy another type of external harddrive....quiet...nice size....artsy...I can move it from my Mac to PC and I didn't have to install software....this product is very sweet...
Now what, .... I have saved all my data in some unknown scrambled format and can't do anything about it.
I was hoping for a storage device that would give me the option of recognizing what I saved and being able to change what needs to be changed at a time when I feel it's necessary.
Now I have to wait till doomsday arrives when I have to reinstall all my unidentifiable scrambled files?
Way to much money for nothing!
I've gone through a lot of hard-drives in the past few years. I tend to burn them out pretty quickly. I transfer every movie I have to them, so All I have to carry around is tiny hard-drive, instead of 500 DVDs. They also look better then a rack of messed up DVDs laying next to your TV.
A few years ago I converted all my CDs to MP3, and then after a disgruntled roommate swapped a bunch of DVDs with the wrong boxes before leaving, I figured it was time to go Digital with my movies as well.
Anyway... When dealing with lots of video (stuff I shoot, stuff I rip from my DVDs, stuff I Edit for Friends in Movie Production) and video storage, You need something that is reliable. I had the iOmega Black Drives for a while, but they are flakey, do not have a hard shut off button, and loose data (sometimes). But they were the best I could find for the price. Must people assume they will pay about $.50 - $1 per GB. I like the companies who try to push that bottom line, and still give you a good product.
Western Digital has been reliable. I have taken it on several trips (plane, auto, sent in the mail) and it holds up. Never had a problem with them. They work with PC and Mac, and have a 500GB storage for under $250. It's small, looks cool, are linkable, and have a very quite fan motor. They go to sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity, and power on if plugged into a computer.
I constantly add, delete, and transfer data on these things, and have had no corruption as of yet.
Right now, I have 3 500GB Western Digital My Books. I am waiting for the 1TB book to get smaller, then I pick one of those up as well. I am SO happy with these things. I don't think I will ever go back to iOmega.
The one problem I run into is the ocational non-detection when dasy-chained. The second or third drive will not show up on your desk top every time. And they will go to sleep, but not shut down on their own if dasy-chained. If you are using just one, it will always be detected, and will shut down if not used for 20 minutes. Even the Blue light will shut off.
I still love them, and will continue to buy more.
Western Digital has the reputation for reliabilty. That's why over 3 years I've purchased five of their drives, approximately 1400 gigs total when formated. These drives are used for the most demanding task, video editing. All have been filled and refilled with footage, images, captions, music and voice.
Data lost to date: 0 kb.
If today the drives go down, I know I am way ahead of many of my companions who saved 20, 30 or 40 bucks and watched 20, 30 or 40 hours of work utterly vanish into the abyss of their cheap hard drives, over and over. The horror.
Totaly exeeded my expectations. At first I thought it would be just like moving files from one drive to another, but with the backup software included and with the FireWire interface things became a lot easier. Yet it looks great on the top of my desk and is very well built and quiet. I love it...
I've been using this little guy to backup my laptop as well as a near-line storage device, and it works great, no problems at all. It has USB & Firewire ports, but I only have USB on my laptop. I really like it's quietness, if it weren't for the lights on the front I'd never know if it were on or not... no fans either, and it doesn't get too warm, but I've got it on a shelf with a lot of ventilation. And for my needs it's more than fast enough... I don't think I'd use it for video editing, but for file access it seems as quick as my laptop's drive. How much do I like it? I'm considering buying another!
My first hard drive was a 20MB mech I installed in a homebuilt 20MHz 80386 box. It could hold every floppy I owned. Wow! At that time we talked about terabyte devices holding the Library of Congress. Now, terabyte storage is well within reach for the average user. How times have changed.
I'm happy with the "WD My Book" and haven't had any problems so far. It connected easily to my laptop and desktop. The case is attractive and the front LED is surprisingly informative. The book-oid design actually works, and the rubber feet (integrated into the "cover" of the book) keep it from sliding around. For best performance use Firewire or USB 2.0! I'm limited to USB 1.0 on one box and it's actually slower than my network. In any case, if you're backing up your big ol' 120GB drive expect to run some overnite file copy sessions. I plan to use it for a media library, but haven't had time to read the blogs on the latest Linux Media Server release.
Hmmm,
I purchased this product from a real world store. This was a good thing because after my cat tipped it over and it lightly < serious emphasis on LIGHTLY > tapped the wood panelling on my wall... it broke. I've dropped things-- computers, laptops, projectors, tv's, and etc. Few things just stop working after a light tap on the wall.
If you have, as my mom calls them, 'Heavy Hands', don't buy this product.
If you have any desire to move this product, in the slightest... say transport it to work... or etc-- don't buy this product-- 'cause I tell you... if you drop this on the way out the door-- it surely won't work when you get to work.
This product has the THINNEST casing imaginable. It appears to be metal--but it is THIN.
If you have ever
When I called WD customer service to get some tech support the technician walked me through a few steps and confirmed that the product was kaput. He advised me to return it and get my money back. He also assured me that 'this is not a normal occurance'.
Hmmm... I am not a frequent purchaser of technology-- more like a person who buys a computer ever 2-3 years and all. I didn't expect to be shopping for a new external hard drive after 8 days.
Oh, and to be positve-- the hold time was only 26 minutes during after work peak hours < 6pm >.
Hey, that's a good thing. Right?
Perhaps it's just me, but this product is not exactly what I thougth it would be... I thought I could move programs and such on to it while I clean up my computers hard drive etc. Oh by the way I have a Mac so maybe this only happens on Mac's...any how I go to move things and this drive suddenly tells me... you can't move this as file name is to long or file name can't be used. OK??? As for the unit it's self it's sort of loud and slow at wake up when it goes to sleep. Perhaps I just expcet too much?
This hard disk had dual interface (Firewire and USB). Both works well but there is no considerable difference in the datatransfer rate. If you are looking for better transfer speeds, harddisks with eSATA interface are way faster. I have travelled a lot carrying this one and I did not have any problems. It even works in all countries (Different power voltages and frequencies with out needing a power adaptor). Ships with FAT32 disk format. I quickly formatted to NTFS and works well with Vista and Xp Sp2.
While WD would like you to believe the drive is 100% Vista compliant, it isn't. The provided backup software crashes or will not run in "Advanced" mode in Vista (on a brand new Vista PC). The drive is slow, and Vista warns all the time of an incompatibilty issue with the driver. I have contacted WD support and there ONLY response is to "see our online knowledgebase".
The good news... It does work (with Vista) as long as you don't rely on the WD backup software.
I love this hard drive. I use it everyday like my regular hard drive and the double ring of light look awesome. If you are thinking of getting a external hard drive get this one cause it has both firewire and usb2. I also use it to back up everything I have so incase the computer ever needs formating, I have everything backed up.
I ordered this drive because I needed some additional storage. No problems. Quick transfers over FireWire 400 to my PowerBook. This drive is also quiet.
I bought one a while back to be used with my Imac. I picked this because they had this auto on and off feature.
The good: depending how you position it is makes very little noise. They include both firewire and usb cable.
The bad: The auto on and off feature works only with USB. I played a lot with it but it never switches off when connected via firewire. In the end this didn't bother me too much so I bought a 2nd one hoping to use my 2nd firewire port or daisychain both drives which should work per WD website. However as the drives share the same firewire ID the mac can not handle this and will not recognize the drives when both are connected. So I ended up with one drive on my USB port, switching on and off automatically and the other connected via firewire always beeing on. Daah.
So my recommendation if you are using a Mac is do not bother to pay extra for firewire even though it seems to be a tad quicker then the USB connection and spend the money on a USB hub.
The ever-increasing size of full resolution digital photographs have rapidly expanded my external storage requirements. This device replaced a 2 year-old 200 GB WD external drive that performed flawlessly (and was never powered off) for over two years.
Obviously the test of a hard drive comes over time, and I've just started using this....but here's the "out of the box" experience:
-Under a recent install of Windows XP SP2, it was immediately recognized by the OS and assigned a drive letter.
-I copied the included utilities and backup software to my desktop, and did a full format from FAT32 to NTFS. This was to accommodate some video files greater than 4 GB in size.
-After reformatting, I moved the included Google desktop, backup software and "power button/capacity gauge LED" back to the new WD HD.
-The included backup software, EMC Retrospect HD v 2 is OK. I was already using a different program that I'm already familiar with [...] "Second Copy 2000", and that I think SC 2000 has a slightly better interface. But: the important thing is to use something!
-The Premium edition's capacity gauge is cute, but of course your OS is going to tell you how much free space you have anyway...
-The drive is very quiet, and I love that it powers off and on with the PC.
WD has a good reputation for hard drives. Any vendor can sell you a lemon though.
Works just fine off of a power strip too...
100-day update (May 26)
This drive handles various daily and weekly backups (full and differential) flawlessly. Excellent value for the price.
I like the hard drive. I use it to back up my laptop and store Tivo files. My only complaint - it will not accept my Tivo files that are 5G and larger. When trying to copy the file, the message said the drive was full, but the drive has plenty of room for the file. I am not a technical person so I don't know why it would not copy the large file.
i bought this thinking that i'd have a piece of mind with my files, photos, music and my digital life in general, however, it failed miserably. after just two weeks of normal use, it was plagued with bad sectors. it was so bad that i can't even copy any of my files back to another harddrive... you know the feeling when you dropped your keys into a sewer or bed-ridden because you caught the flu? well... needless to say, this is the worst insurance i've ever purchased.
please please please do not spend your hard earned dollars with this product. thank you.
So far so good. It is quite and fast. I'm using it with a Mac Book Pro. Not so sure I like the built in software as much as Apple`s backup software. Good value for the money. Looks good - not obtrusive.
I did a good amount of research before I bought the Western Digital drive. I was attracted by its large capacity and positive review that I saw on Amazon and other sites.
The reviews were correct as far as my experince--the drive has massive capacity, works well and was simple to install. It's USB plug-and-play, so I should say that I plugged it in and it installed itself.
I gave it 4 stars because I was disappointed with the software. The interface is frustrating. It does full and differential back-ups of my user files just fine when I tell it to do so manually. But, as far as I can tell, the scheduling feature simply doesn't work. I've printed the scanty four-page manual and followed the trivial steps closely several times and even tried a few of my own. Nothing. The scheduled times show up just as the manual says. However, it has never run yet at a scheduled time.
I have owned and loved Western Digital products for many years. Unfortunately, they should have remained in the IDE and EIDE market and stayed out of the USB market, at least until they figured out how USB works.
I installed this product several weeks back and was hoping I could make the quirks, kinks, and overall instabilities go away, since I've been a huge Western Digital fan for many years. Alas, this is not possible. And my e-mails on their support site go unanswered. I simply get automatic e-mails, telling me that I need to try solutions that I've already tried...several times.
I've downloaded and updated the latest of every piece of software and every driver available and unfortunately, this wonderfully huge hard drive, that I would love to depend on, simply goes into la-la land at least once a day. At first, it appears in Windows Explorer to be there, but clicking on this drive will do little more than attempt to make me believe there is nothing on it, even though I have put over 100 GB of files onto it. That is, the content portion of the Explorer is simply blank. I reboot countless times to no avail. When I reboot, the drive simply shows the same results -- no data at all -- or the drive doesn't appear at all. When it doesn't appear in Explorer at all, I go into the Device Manager to find an "Unknown device". Uninstalling it and re-installing does little more than cause more frustration.
I know I should probably try the Firewire interface. However, I spent a lot of money to buy this drive; buying more hardware to, hopefully, simply satiate the needs of this particular piece of hardware, doesn't make fiscal sense to me.
I'm sorry, Western Digital, to give you a bad review, but please please please figure out how USB interfaces function before you produce another drive available and tarnish your good name any further. At this time, I can't even get my data off of your drive and I won't return it until I figure out how to do so. I will probably have to spend more money to figure out how to erase the information, simply so I can return it. We depend on companies like you to hold our valuable, personal information. This experience has been a very sour, disappointing let-down.
You can disregard all the posts complaining of issues sharing this device over your network, or not being able to plug them into a power-strip. I'm running two of them side-by-side, via a USB hub, networked, powered by a power-strip, and they work just fine.. and I'm purchasing a 3rd for a back-up in the next week or so..
They plug in easily, are quickly recognized by the PC, can be reformatted NTFS, and then are just ready go to.
Some people complaining of slow data transfer may be running PCs with older versions of USB or simply have slow PCs. Yes, USB is slower than say SCSI or attached network drives, but it's not as slow as some people are claiming so I believe that's their own hardware shortcoming.
I bought this hard drive as a back-up to another 250 GB external drive and while for the most part it works as stated, there are times when it can be a little bit of a pain. I use it with a Mac and sometimes it has problems when the computer goes into sleep mode and the back-up program it comes with is nothing amazing. It does the minimum though and for the price is still a good deal.
Very Satisfied and would have given 5 stars but for two items:
First, and the most annoying is that once in awhile the USB HD will no longer appear as an available drive on my system. I would have to re-boot and re-apply the share options, so I could access the drive from other computers on my local network. I have put on some misc patches (not from WD) and for the last couple of weeks this symptom has not re-appeared (wished I remembered which patch/fix/update it was).
Second, when the Drive is in standby mode, it sometimes powers up for no reason. I am not accessing it, but something triggers it.
Other than that, no problem, I followed suggestions of other reviewers and saved off the pre-loaded software/data and formatted it HPFS before I started loading data. Thanks for others willing to take time and share their tips!
When I first setup Drive it seemed to be working fine. A few days later I tried backing up 147GB data. It took a day and a half to back it up. Then the Drive started from time to time not being recognized by the system. I decided to re-format Drive and it seems to be working fine.
I have a Seagate and a WD next to eachother and all file transfers take double the time in the WD. Transfer of 22 Gigs (txt files) took almost 4 hours with the WD 350 G.
Very easy to use, no need to install the software....quite portable and has caused me no grief.....truly a blessing in the digital world....
Easy to install. To get most out of it read how to structure your backup files expecially if you are backing up multiple computers. Minimal problem with software downloading to 3rd computer but WD telephone help solved issue. Bit slow even with USB2 so backup while your doing something else. overall highly recommended JPH
This is a sturdy little unit and has both firewire and USB2. Firewire is very useful if you are ever likely to attach the My Book to an older Apple or happen to have a Firewire port on your PC (so you can keep a few essential USB2 ports free). Technically you can attach this drive to a USB1 but with a 50x slower transfer speed the drive is unusable (a 12 min USB2 file transfer takes 6 hours via USB1 if it finishes at all) - so just get a Belkin USB2/Firewire PCI card (or similar) to upgrade an older PC if necessary.
When you connect the My Book via USB2, software on the external hard drive loads onto the PC and from then on the hard drive is ready to go. It's hot swappable - unplug the cable and the My Book simply powers down (there's a software WD disconnect procedure to ensure data being transferred isn't lost, I have once accidently switched off this independently powered hard drive while moving pictures from a camera and I lost all the pictures on the camera card - fortunately freeware PhotoRec recovered them). The My Book switches on & off automatically with the PC. The circle of LEDs on the front of the My Book tell you whether the drive is on and whether it's doing anything. The unit only seems to be happy standing upright like a book, and it is very stable. I did get a lot of vibration from the unit feeding to the desk and keyboard, when the drive was spinning, but this was cured completely by adding four little stick-on cork feet (not supplied). From then on I haven't notice the drive when it's spinning. The hard drive is great for backup and storing digital photographs or MS Office files, and access time is almost as quick as my ATA66 internal drives. Naturally it's too slow for games, but it gives your internal drive far more space for them. Plus there's no IDE BIOS limitations on disk size (typically 120Gb or even 8.4Gb on older PCs). Unlike the 1TB version, there's no cooling fans, just a lot of vent holes - any noise is just the hard drive spinning. The only delay you really get is waiting for the drive to spin up when it goes into sleep mode. It was very easy to wireless network as well, providing storage for all four home PC's (providing the host PC is switched on) - but it's relatively slow used this way. I've always been a fan of Western Digital (like Maxtor all they only make are hard drives so their web sites are great being only focused on hard drives with all relevant software downloads and manuals very quick to find). If you use the My Book for backup, still make DVD copies of important data though, as if any one steals your PC or lightning strikes nearby, the PC and My Book are likely to go together.
So overall I am very happy with this cheap My Book external storage drive - so much so I'm buying another one for my study PC. Plus it is just portable enough to be dragged off to another PC in the house for occasional fast data backup. Highly recommended.
this is a great device. Lotsa storage for the price and very easy to setup and use. Buy it!
Excellent results. Easy install, good performance, massive capacity. I suggest you put a cloth under it if you have it on a wood table -- the table amplifies the sound of the drive motor. With a cloth under it, the drive is very quiet.
I purchased the WD 500 GB drive 2 months ago to use primarily for photo and video storage to free up space from my PC. Was easily able to reformat the disk to handle NTFS file system. But, that wiped out the pre-installed software. So, had to download that from the WD website, which wasn't that big of a nuisance. Experienced no problems loading all of my photos, etc on the device. Have had no problems and really like the design. Would certainly buy again.
Have used many external drives over the years, and this one has a great price point and reliability. Highly recommended.
The WD drive itself is a great drive. Stylish, compact for a 500GB. The Software to disconnect the drive is annoying. I would rather click on the eject hardware button in windows and stop the device. It will not allow it to stop it when trying to do it that way. All in all, it's a decent drive.
I purchased this unit after looking at many 500gb external hard drives. In addition to liking Western Digital's reputation, I liked the fact of having both the Firewire and USB 2 connections on the drive. The drive was formatted as one large FAT32 partition. XP users, like me, would want it formatted as a NTFS drive, which required re-formatting. But, before you reformat, be sure to copy the WD directory on the drive to your hard drive so you don't lose it! The reformatting took an hour or so. Once that was done I ran the Firewire driver included in the WD directory and then plugged it into my system. The system recognized it easily and the drive was ready for backups.
Using the Firewire connection I backed up over 19GB of data in less than 40 minutes. While it is not the fastest drive, it is plenty fast enough for most of us. Recommend this drive highly!
I attached this little thing to my G5 Mac using FireWire and it came up immediately on my desktop. No need for any additional software or anything else. I got it in July and so far it has been working pretty well. It is very silent and though at times when I rendering video files directly to it, it does get a little too warm to touch. other than that i think this is a great investment and i am buying a couple more of these babies.
P.S. They also look great on the shelf. I am getting the white ones just because. :)
I presently have a 50 gig hard drive which was extremely close to capacity. A family member recommended WD 500 GB external hard drive to enable me to transfer all my photo albums to. It worked. Best investment to date.
I just received the 500 GB Premium My Book. This product is easy to use. The software installs automatically when you connect via USB for the first time. I personally did not like the included backup software, thus the 4 stars. I think Windows XP backup is a better choice.
Performance: The speed is acceptable. On my PC the drive can sustain roughly 40MB/s when reading a large file using the Firewire 400 interface. A good internal drive is faster, so if you need high speed, buy an internal drive instead. The drive does make some noise, but the noise level does not bother me even in a quiet room. The drive gets warm to the touch while in operation, but I don't foresee problems with excessive heat buildup. The drive shuts off automatically.
I was in desperate need of extra HD space, so I purchased this HD. It was extremely easy to set up, and the dual interface capabilities are wonderful. It's a breeze to use the USB 2.0 with my Windows PC and the Firewire with my Macs.
The one problem I have with it is I can't figure out how to get it to mount back onto my computer after I've ejected it from my desktop. I would expect the single large button on the front to do that, however I have to unplug the power cable and plug it back in in order to get it to mount. Or, I can put my computer to sleep and when it wakes up the disk is mounted.
Besides that small glitch the HD has treated me quite well and I would recommend it to anyone looking for additional storage space. Keep in mind though, if you computer has a FW 800 port, there is a version of the HD that has that port also.
I was really enthused about this drive. However, the lack of a physical on/off power switch seemed a little bizarre when I took it out of the packaging. It came up FAT32 and I wanted compressed NTFS so I fired up disk management under Windows and started up the format. At about 5% the format "finished", it said the drive was RAW but there really wasn't a drive there. The blue lights were on. I went to re-format it and it wouldn't format. I tried to activate the partition and Windows said "unexpected error", please restart. I plugged it into another computer and it wouldn't recognize it as a hard drive. I power cycled the first machine, plugged it in, no blue light, doesn't recognize it as a hard drive. I am returning this and will not trust my data to any Western Digital "My Book" product. Good concept, very flawed execution. Don't trust your data to this product line.
Overall this is a great hard drive. The dual interface is a nice feature. Sometimes, however, the drive refuses to turn off via it's built in button on the front.
What's not to like? On 3 different systems, two with XP Pro and one with XP home, it plug-and-played like a dream. The backup software included with the drive is fast and uncomplicated to use, with a minimum of user intervention required.
The drive is compact, quiet, and it even color-coordinates with my matte-black ( vendor name dell-eted ) desktop.
I wanted an extra hard disk. I ordered this one. It arrived promptly. It has worked without a hitch.
500 GB of storage that's fast and easy to use. And for almost 50 cents per Gigabyte? What's not to like about that? I like the fact that it givves you BOTH a firewire and USB cable too!
I'm an amateur photographer shooting .raw with a canon 20d and use this harddrive not only to back up my computers harddrive, but also to store all of my images and my photoshop files to keep my main cpu running clean, and it works great. Its very simple to use and transfer files to the HD and the autoupdate is very simple and works great. For its size, its a great deal, at less than a dollar per GB, and its never given me any problem, just sits quietly on my desk. The only con is in transfering large image files it can take a few minutes, but this only happens to me because of the large file size (18mb) of .raw images. Otherwise, I'd recommend this, and any other WD external hd to anyone.
5 stars.
The drive has one important problem. When a PowerMac G5 goes to sleep the drive, connected by Firewire, loses contact. When the Mac wakes a dialog box appears saying that a device has been improperly removed. Since there is no on-off switch on the drive, it is necessary to unplug-replug it. (It doesn't appear to have this problem when connected by USB.) Western Digital does not seem to have implemented Firewire so that it is wholly compatible with Apple products.
Update: Other people are reporting sleep problems with these drives, but resetting the PMU on the Mac seems to have fixed it for me. However, the drive too frequently goes to sleep, and there is no way to control this. It is annoying waiting for the drive to waken.
Second update: The drive problem has resurfaced with Apple's update to 10.4.9. I'm also having fatal problems with Western Digital's Passport drive. Beware this company's current drives with Macs.
I know there have been a few negative reviews for this drive from Mac users. I'm a Mac user and my experience is this drive works perfectly for me. Yes, I can plug it into a power strip and it works (why wouldn't it?)
The drive is really quiet so I don't mind it being on. This is unlike my LaCie drive (it uses a 120GB Western Digital) which is quite noisy. I also absolutely love the design of this WD drive--very compact and unobtrusive.
For Mac uses using the latest versions of OS X, first copy the Mac versions of the WD software to another drive, then reformat it as Mac OS Extended Journal. Then install the WD software.
This drive works wonderfully!
We're using this to hold our music collection for iTunes with our old Mac G4 tower, and transfer of files and accessibility was (and is) fast and smooth. Yes, you do have to format the drive for Mac OS using Disk Utility in the Utilities folder, and the lame backup software that this comes with isn't Mac compatible, but Backup by Apple is a far more elegant solution, anyways! Don't hesitate if you need a lot of storage, and don't be discouraged because some of it's 'features' are just sales gimmicks. This hard drive is quiet, sleeps when it's supposed to, and is fast enough for most applications.
I've been using this drive for about a month now. BUY IT! I don't know if there are some defective drives out there or what but several of the negative claims sounded very odd to me. The first thing I did when I got the drive was to plug it into a power strip.. It came right up.
Next, since I'm running a home network with several computers and a wireless laptop, I shared out the drive on my network. It worked like a champ. I can read and write data to it without a problem. Here are the steps you should use to properly share a drive in Windows XP:
1. On the computer you're sharing, open My Computer.
2. Right-click the hard drive you want to share and choose Sharing and Security from the shortcut menu that appears.
The Sharing tab appears, displaying a message that warns you that sharing a drive isn't a good idea. Beneath the message is a link that you can click to indicate that you understand the risk but want to share the drive. Then the Sharing tab changes to reveal the options that allow you to share the drive.
3. Select the Share This Folder on the Network option.
4. Enter a name for the share.
5. Select the Allow Network Users to Change My Files option.
If you don't select this option, network users can view files but can't create new files or modify existing files. Because you're a network user when you want to work on a file on this computer from a different computer, there's not much point in restricting what network users can do. However, the security in Windows XP is rather complicated, and it gets more complicated when you share folders.
6. Click OK.
Now, to access your new share on another computer you'll need two pieces of info: the name of your computer with the drive and the name of the share you just created. To find your computer name, right click on "My Computer" and choose Properties. Click on the "Computer Name" tab. In the middle of the page you'll see "Full computer name:" followed by your full computer name. If there is a dot after the computer name, you can ignore it. Write down your computer name and the name of the share you just created and head over to one of your network machines that you'd like to access the drive on.
Right click on "My Computer" and choose "Map Network Drive". A window with two fields will come up "Drive" and Folder" and a check box "Reconnect at logon".
In the Drive box, pick the drive letter you want the drive to have in My Computer. In the folder box, type the following using the name of your computer with the drive and the name of the share you created:
\\computername\sharename
Where computername is the computer you hooked up the shared mybook to and sharename is the name of the share you created.
If you want the computer to automatically reconnect to the share every time it reboots, you can check the reconnect at logon box.
Just click Finish and you're done!
Now, back to the My Book 500gb Premium Edition. I find it to be very quiet and unobtrusive. It has two blue rings around the power button that light up. The outside ring is a power and drive activity light that will flash and move when you are reading or writing data to the drive. The inside ring is actually a drive capacity light that tells you how much room is left on the drive! If your drive is half full, the half of the inside ring will be lit!
The center of the two rings is a power button. It shuts the drive completely off. One thing to note on this: when using the included backup software, you can (and should) schedule your backups to run automatically at regular times. If you power off the drive by pushing the middle power button, the drive cannot power itself back up automatically to complete your backup.
I have found that you don't really need to power off the drive anyway as it will slow itself down and go to a standby mode if it isn't accessed for a long time. The power stays on and the blue rings stay lit, but it does go into a power save mode. It will wake back up right away when you want to access it.
The drive also monitors the pc and knows when you turn off your computer. It automatically turns itself off when your pc is off and back on when your pc is turned back on! This is actually a big deal as most of the "do it yourself" external drive kits have a hard power button and the thing will be on until you manually turn it off.
There are 3 different flavors of this drive. The Essential Edition pretty much comes with the drive with USB connectivity and that's it. This works fine for a lot of people.
The Premium Edition comes with the drive, USB and Firewire connectivity and software for your computer including a backup program that is so easy that your grand parents can use it as well as google desktop search to help you find files on your computer just as easy as googling things on the web.
The Pro Edition is identical to the Premium except that it comes with a faster Firewire port for those who need it and it is white instead of black (Probably to match Apple Computers since those are the most likely ones to use a faster Firewire port).
I find that the drive does not get hot at all. If you put your hand on the vents on the top of the drive it will be warm, but that's it. I'm not worried about heat build up on this drive.
Installation:
The software that is included in the Premium Edition is actually on the hard drive itself and once you attach the drive to the computer and power it on, the drive will be recognized and installed by windows and the software install screen will usually pop up automatically. If for some reason this doesn't come up automatically, you can open My Computer, click on the new drive letter and click on the "autorun" file. This should make the software run. Just follow a basic simple install choosing whether you want to install the backup software and google optional pieces and your done.
As for speed, I haven't done any scientific benchmarks, but I've copied a few 4 gig test files back and forth and I'm quite happy with the speed.
In conclusion, the drive works, requires no maintenance, setup is a breeze and it looks cool on top of it all. Also, people complained that you can't plug it into a power strip, I did not have that problem, people said you can't network it, I was able to network it easily.
One more note. People need to realize the tech support terminology can be misleading. When you call tech support and say you're having trouble networking the my book drive, if they tell you that networking is not supported, that does NOT mean that you can't do it, it just means that tech support doesn't think that is a problem with the drive so they won't spend the time to tell you how to do it. If you are trying to figure out how to do something try doing a search with google or A9.com like "how to share a drive in windows xp". You'd be suprised at the things you'll learn!
I was scared when I read that this drive does not work with powerstrip. But I went ahead and opened the box anyway and plugged mybook into a powerstrip. It worked!! I also tried to plug it into UPS, and it worked on UPS too. Mine was bought from CC.
Another nice feature of this drive is that the drive spins down after a period of inactivity. I think it spin down after about 10 minutes. Ofcourse if powers off when you put your computer on standby, as advertised. The spin down feature was very important for me since I plan to use this drive on SimpleShare NAS (Network Attached Storage). The drive inside SimpleShare has capacity to spin down on it's own but SimpleShare cannot spin down USB drives attached to it. By the way, for the nossy ones: I plan to use MyBook with SimpleShare as RAID 1 (Mirrored) drive. No more manual backups for me.
Mind you everyone using external USB drives: If the drive does not spin down and keeps spinning all the time then you are going to see a dead drive in 1-2 years with all your precious data lost.
Other features are very well reviewd by fellow users.
This review is from the perspective of a Mac user. I am guessing that, for the most part, this is good product for PC users... but I think there are some things that Mac users need to know before they purchase. Things that Western Digital fails to mention in their product descriptions, and even in their user manuals.
Let me begin by saying, this product says it is Mac compatible, but it is obviously designed mainly for PC. Also, the user manual is an obsolute joke. It is only a few pages and fails to go beyond basic install instructions. If, for whatever reason, the automatic install they brag so much about in their product descriptions doesn't work as advertised (it didn't for me!), expect to be on the phone with customer service.
1. First thing I noticed was that on the box (in fine print) it says that the Google software that comes with the drive does not run on Macs. I was unable to locate anywhere where this information is provided pre-order. Okay, that kinda sucks, but it's not really a deal breaker, so I went ahead and opened up the box.
2. Regardless of your OS, the drive won't work properly if it is plugged into a power strip, so your going to have to keep a power outlet open for just this single device. This is just kinda sketchy to begin with, but it also makes plugging it in at your work station that much more difficult. (Not mentioned in user manual)
3. Nowhere will you be informed that the drive is, in fact, not "plug and play" for at least some Macs... In fact I believe it specifically goes out of it's way to imply to be "plug and play" for both operating systems. I thought this was great as I would be able to use the drive to transport my files conveniently from computer to computer (including from my Mac to PCs). This is not true. First of all, on Macs the drive will not be "plug and play" at all. You will need to reformat the drive with disk utility before it will even appear on the desktop (Even though in the directions it claims it will appear automatically after being plugged in and fails to even mention the possibility this won't happen). Once you have reformatted, you will only be able to use the drive on other Macs. Now maybe some of you are saying, "You idiot! Everyone knows that you can't use a hard drive on two different OS!" Well, in my opinion, the description of this product ommits an explanation of the true nature of its OS compatibility, at best.... and at worst, it uses intentionally misleading language.
4. Finally, there was no way for me to know any of this if I hadn't opened the box. This is the important part... If you open the box, Western Digital will absolutely refuse to provide even a partial refund.
Am I saying not to buy this product? No... What I am saying is that Mac users need to be aware that this product is not quite as Mac compatible as Western Digital claims.
Mac users beware...
I was initially drawn to the My Book from Western Digital because of the size, price, and footprint. Unfortunately, I hadn't researched enough reviews from previous owners.
After bringing the drive home, I plugged it into the computer and it loaded right up. I downloaded 6 or 7 gigs of important documents onto it, and went to bed. The next day it turned on once more, and then never again. After numerous e-mails to their tech department, I have yet to get a response.
If the previous reviewer is right, (and I'm afraid he is), I'll be lucky to get a replacement, and have no chance of getting my data back. With what I've lost, it is the most expensive piece of computer equipment I've ever bought.
i advice you to buy this product if you need a huge storage.
Thanks
I tried this drive on two different computers using two different USB cables but neither computer would detect it. I finally called Western Digital and they advised me to plug it directly into a wall outlet, not a power bar. I did, and it worked, but in my case it was a fatal flaw as the only wall outlet in my work area is buried behind a heavy desk, and both receptacles are already in use. I can't understand how it could even make a difference whether it's plugged into the wall or a power bar, but apparently it does since WD said it's a known problem. This seems like a limiting factor on the drive's versatility and portability, and I also worry about how reliable it will be if it's so sensitive to such a basic detail as the type of power outlet.
I have had two of these crash in one week, losing all my data. The drive seems to freeze when it warms up. While Western Digital's support quickly replaces the drives (with remanufactured drives) they are not helpful at all with fixing your existing drive. It's very disconcerting to hear them say "Yep, it's no good. Go ahead and reformat." I have had a Maxon external for two years without any problems. I will not be buying another Western Digital.
I'm rating this 4 stars because I've only started using this drive (but so far I've saved to it Windows system backups for two computers and transferred a total of 55 GB to it). I haven't had any problems. I can't compare it with any other external drives and can't compare its speed with anything else (but both backups were done simultaneously, the 2nd over a wireless connection, while files were also being transferred).
Mainly I wanted to give a different point of view to an earlier review, even though I bought a slightly different model, My Book Essential Edition, which has no software and is limited to a USB connection only (on sale at Best Buy for $200). Someone indicated a problem sharing the drive over the network and attributed this to a Western Digital constraint. This may depend on the type of connection. The comment almost kept me from buying this drive, because I want to be able to access it from my notebook as well as from my desktop, but I don't think the particular brand of a drive can limit standard USB connectivity. Anyway, I don't have any problem sharing the drive over my home network. I'm using Windows XP. (I reformatted the drive from a FAT drive to an NTFS drive to enable larger file sizes, etc., but that has no effect on the ability to share a USB drive.)
Be VERY aware that this comes formatted was FAT32; if you're planning on storing files larges than 4G you'll need to reformat to NTFS.
Other than that little annoyance, the product is great.
I now have two of these(1 250g & 1 500g) and they are great!!
if you want to add space to your computer without hassle,
get one of these!!!
I ran out of space on my 80GB backup external HD, so I looked for the largest external I could find. The 500GB from WD was the answer. I went for the WDG1C5000N to take advantage of the USB (for my older work Windows-based laptop) and Firewire (for my newer personal MacBook). I didn't need nor want the fancy backup software. I use the .Mac backup software on the Mac and I the batch file I used to backup the Windows machine on the 80GB works fine on the 500GB.
No fuss back up and it's quieter than the old 80GB.
I have had this drive for two days and after copying files over and setting it up, I found I could not network the drive! An error occurs referring to not enough server space. I did my research and found that for most people who encounter this problem the solution is quick and easy, but for Western Digital, they do not support sharing over a network! Strange, but I tried everything to get it to work. This is my most disappointing purchase in some time, I am returning it and will never by Western Digital again.
This HD is perfect. Fast, reliable and easy to configure and use. I Do not know about support because I never needed at all :-).
While the product itself seems to be stylish and a good value, mine never transferrred data reliably with any of my Windows computers and refused to power on after a week. WD customer support was so slow that I was forced to return it back to Amazon and purchase a different product. Perhaps a one of a kind flaw, but enough to make me never purchase from this manufacturer again.
The unit works as advertised.
I did need to do a re-format to create both NTFS and FAT partitions. With the FAT32 partitions the unit also works with my iMAC as well with Windows. The backup to the MyBook is about as fast as USB can go. Once the files are on the MyBook, it is easy to copy the files off to my HP Storageworks DAT72 USB tape drive for long term saving.
I have two of these. Both installed in my Gateway XP Pro system without any problems. I don't use them heavily, but, so far so good ...
The very first thing that got my eye when considering to purchase the WD is that I'd no longer need to make back-ups on disc. Now I don't!. The book does the job of over a 100 DVDs and all your data is in one attractive looking book shaped storage unit. I use windows xp which acknowledges immediately when another piece of hardware is detected. Once XP sees the unit plugged up be it firewire or usb, it tells you and ask if you want to install the WD software which is on the WD itself. You don't have to unless you really what to see the extra bells and whistle. If you don't install the software the WD appears like a new drive seen from your windows explorer folder. You can create a new folder as easy as you would in XP... then either drag or copy your valuable data to your new folder in the WD... I plan on getting a couple more. It is a sturdy compact piece of machinery that the average person would mistake for a book. In fact I keep my on my bookshelf with my books. So for me if you're running XP this is the way to go. The only way I could see this product getting better is that they'd increase the hard drive size. But for now the 500 GB is excellent for my needs. Good job Western Digital! I think you've found your strength!
WD's My Book was worth the purchase. Small, quiet and fast. It has two Firewire ports and one USB port and comes with one of each types of cable. I bought mine so I could back up all my important files from my Mac but I ended up using it to backup the entire contents of my hard drive using the enclosed backup software. The program was easy to understand and works great on OSX Tiger. I can't vouch for how it works on a PC, I try not to use them if I don't have to! The only thing I don't like about the drive is that it can get pretty warm, but that was after an hour or two of backing up my entire hard drive, so that is probably to be expected. I checked out a bunch of other external firewire drives on Amazon and Apple's websites before I decided on this one and I'm pretty happy with My Book.
I use this drive as a backup on my Mac. Periodically I take it out of the closet and attach it to my Mac through the Firewire port. I copy everything from my Mac hard drive to the WD 500, then I turn it off and put it away.
BTW, I reformatted it for the Macintosh to improve speed and reliability.
No Problems. No Muss. No Fuss. Works exactly as expected.
As the earlier reviews mentioned it is easy to use and the documentation is only 2 pages. It works fine for media files but it isn't very good for backing up the OS or programs files. The software although easy to use is a bit sloppy. During a backup if it finds a file it doesn't like for one reason or another it kills the entire backup and you have to hunt down the "bad" file and fix or remove it. After 5 days of trying to get a 40GB backup I've had to resort to moving them folder by folder. It also will not work if you don't have XP service pack 1 installed. You may want to consider a spare HD, external case and a main stream backup software program.
I'll make this review quick and dirty.
It's extremely quiet, very fast, looks good, takes up very little space, easy to install and use, and holds a ton of stuff. I use it exclusively to hold my photos( up to a couple thousand so far). I shoot mainly in RAW so they're all large files. Of course the price is right, under a buck per gig.
This unit is the ticket. Look no further. Buy it.
After a distressing hard drive failure a couple of years ago, I've been hyper about backups (and backups of my backups...) for home data. I recently purchased this to backup my music and photo files and so far it's been great. It is extremely easy to set up; you plug it in, load the software, ask it to update your music and photo files, and off it goes. For me, the first backup of 80GB of music and photos took about 90 minutes.
It's also an extremely rugged piece -- a nice solid metal case that is heavy enough to stay put on your desktop (I have an older, lighter firewire drive that is always getting pushed around...this WD drive is definitely going to stay put where it is).
The only thing I don't like about it is that the documentation is pretty skimpy, and the WD website didn't seem to have a lot about this hard drive on it. I guess if I have no problems with it I won't miss the documentation, but I would feel better if there were a little more information readily available.
I use the drive as a storage place for my media and such and I haven't had a problem yet. I keep it in an underventilated place, and it never gets very hot. The only way I know it's on is by looking at it, can't hear a thing. My laptop doesn't have a firewire port, so I use a PCMCIA firewire card and it works fine. I'm completely satisfied with it. This refers to the 320Gb version, but it's all WD baby. I wish I knew they had a 500Gb version for $50 more than I paid for mine. Live and learn.
I had this 500GB MyBook up and running about 60 seconds out of the box. Took me longer to push the plug into my UPS than the computer took to mount it as a drive!
For compatibility reasons the drives all come formatted in FAT32. To use for video editing, which is why I bought it, I had to re-format it to NTSF. the reformat that took only a minute or two and I was off and running.
Great drive, brainlessly simple to install and use.
Sorry I can't comment on the backup software but I only use this for Video and photo and I have an NAS for all backup.
I bought this hard drive about three weeks ago. It was working fine until about a couple of days ago it decided not to be recognized. I unplugged it, rebooted it, rebooted my laptop, connected it to another PC, connected it to another Mac, used the firewire interface, and it wouldn't be recognized by any of the machines! Then a half hour later, i tried again and it worked fine...With the exception of this strange behaviour (which I hope won't repeat) it's a good purchase well worth the price.
I'd read reviews all over the net and this seemed to fit my needs for a reliable external drive to go with the lappy...particularly given the WD name. I was wrong, wrong, wrong. This drive is garbage.
Worked fine for a few months and then became unstable. On/off button won't work, drive won't even spin up sometimes, have to unplug power and plug it in during a reboot to get it to work. What a waste.
I'm tranferring all my client files to another drive before I lose them completely. One thing's for certain, I'm furious.
My best guess is that when the ambient room temp is above 76F it just goes south, despite being in a well ventilated area.
The WD premium 500gb harddisk is compact, has a good amount of storage space, is fast and reliable. It has a nominal 7,200 RPM speed and 16mb buffer. Noise/ heat emanating from the unit is low. There is a handy AUTO sleep/ wakeup feature.
The difference between this and the Essential edition is the FireWire 400 and capacity guage in the Premium edition.
However, as many others have mentioned before, the inner blue ring meant to be the Capacity Gauge gets a lot of background light from the outer ring, and hence its function is still in doubt for me.
But, considering performance, reliability and storage-this is a great drive to archive files-for students, professionals and home users alike.
This unit isn't small enough for travel use though. So, I use a 120gb WD Passport for that. The real difference is the USB powerup in the passport (but slower R/W speed) vs the Power cord in the MyBook (with higher transfer speeds.)
The advertising for this drive would have you believe this is a plug and play hard drive. I had no reason to disbelieve that. I have an older 100 GB external drive from Western Digital, with plug and play installation, and that served me well for years. I leave my old drive plugged into the wall and the computer, and just use the power switch to turn it on when needed. Easy!
Well, I tried for a couple hours to get the computer to recognize my new MyBook. My computer wouldn't recognize the MyBook with USB or Firewire. (Indeed, the Firewire installation directions simply say to install via USB first, and then magically "install via Firewire," while providing no help at all.) I finally encountered some help on line. The MyBook is very finicky about how you attach it. You can't leave it hooked up to the computer - a huge hassle to those of use that have computers in locations where access to the FireWire and USB ports on the back is not easy. You have to first plug in power, then plug in the data cable to the drive, then to the computer, in that precise order. And you must remove the device in Windows, every time, in order to have your computer see the drive next time.
OK, so my computer saw the drive in USB. No joy with FireWire. Not after hours of trying. I finally discover (in part from a good review below) that Western Digital shipped a bunch of these with defective FireWire cables that might actually damage the bus. It might have been nice if WD had recalled the units with defective cables rather than leaving them out there for people to buy. I got a new cable from the computer store, and as if by magic, my computer could see the drive via FireWire -- but only via the two connectors on the card I hadn't used before. The defective cable fried one of the three connectors. Thanks, Western Digital. At least it works fine now that I know how to baby it to life via one of the two remaining connectors.
Next time I'm trying a Seagate.
I'd only recommend these drives if you find them at a really good sale price, and if you are technically inclined enough to do your own troubleshooting. The included backup software isn't worth spending extra money for. Bought two drives on sale about three weeks ago. Both appear to be working okay now but had some problems with drives not being properly recognized at first. Also had problems with system crashing when I followed instructions to first turn off the drive's power button, but now seems to work okay as long as I first use Windows XP's "Safely Remove Hardware" icon at the bottom of the screen. The included Retrospect backup software also has drawback of creating one huge proprietary format backup file which can create problems if you need to transfer or restore onto a new or replacement system that doesn't have same backup software installed - kind of defeats the whole purpose of having external backup drives. I just copied all the files first using Windows Explorer, then used free version of SyncBack to let me do comparisons and incremental backup with a normal file system.
I like the My Book, but I am having problems with it shutting down automatically when turning off my computer. Other than that I like the product.
I first used a product similar to this when editing video for a grad school project. My portable DVD camcorder couldn't connect straight to the computers; so the department said, "Use this".
Years later, I needed to back up my main computer. Having suffered through one hard drive meltdown I vowed never to not back up again. Was burning DVD-RWs but couldn't manage to keep the number of discs needed down to less than 20.
Enter the Mybook. Connecting this to my computer was as simple as "Power Cord, USB Cord, Done" The computer recognized it, and then it loaded the software. I switched to a Firewire cable for my initial backup (faster transfer times) and then used the USB 2.0 connection for my routine backups. The MyBook sits on my desk; and quietly makes sure I'll never lose any of my data again.
I have no cons for this device. It works like a charm.
not any louder than the 250 gig.
love it.
never had a problem with this one or the 250
running both on my macbook
The Westren Digital 500 gig External HD is about the size of your average bible, and at an afordable price you absolutely can't go wrong.Western Digital My Book Premium 500 GB External Hard Drive with Dual Interface ( WDG1C5000N )
FINNALLY!MORE THAN ENOUGH SPACE!! Works perfectly. The only problem i have with it though is that my data transfers alot faster when i use the USB port than the Firewire.-_- I don't know, may