Western Digital WDG2TP10000N My Book Pro Edition II 1 TB USB/Firewire Triple Interface External Hard Drive
I bought one of these drives recently and was *shocked* at how loud the internal fan is. Within 5 minutes of turing the drive on and copying over files the fan kicked in and it was like I had a leaf blower in the office. It's totally unusable. Maybe other people are fine with high levels of fan noise or put them in already loud areas, but put this thing in a quiet office and it's brutal. I'm returning it asap. I have no idea if this is a one-off situation or they're all like this. It doesn't seem to be defective and there is nothing in the software to reduce fan speed or lower the noise level. Just thought I'd post this as a warning to people who are looking at these drives. Buyer beware.
I bought the My Book Premium Edition II 1TB external drive. (1 year warranty, darker color, comes with backup software) I too have this really loud intermitent fan noise which is louder than 2 PVR, one Dish receiver, 3 outher external hard drives, a PC and an AV receiver combined times 3. I can hear it from the next room. Not tolerable unless it can be corrected.
I totally have to agree with the earlier reviewer who mentioned the noise level on this thing. The box, the site, the descriptions all take great pains to describe this as a whisper-quiet, fanless system. They are all wrong. The thing is like having a 747 start up in your office. it's deafeningly loud. It's great that you can get 1TB of storage to sit on your desktop, but at the expense of your peace and quiet? i dunno... it's becoming a hard trade-off. There doesn't appear to be any way around it either. Once the fan starts you're typically in for at least 20 minutes of full-blast, wind-tunnel action. If you can tolerate the noise, it's a near ideal storage solution.
I have never written a review for any product in my life. But I felt that it is important for this one. The fan is unbelievable. It is like having a small very frustrated vacuum cleaner on all the time. I was so amped to expand my storage in a single unit. Moses Jesus Mohammed Buddha and Chango this is loud. I am trying to work with it next to me I have music on fairly loud and it makes no difference. Actually it makes it worse. It is not a serene hum, or a neutral sound in any way. It is a very imposing and damaging machine. It is like a frightening science project in an insane asylum. More like an airplane or an industrial processor than something that one reads and writes next to. It is clear that this machine will create problems for me. I can hear it from outside my house.
Ok - I have been around in the graphics biz for over 2 decades and I would have to say that WD has 'jumped the shark' ('jumped the couch' nowadays). First off - I wanted to try this out for my mac laptop as a photo library for Aperture, being that it could run in raid 1 i decided to buy this from provantage. I received my product on Nov 2nd. I opened the box and get this, sealed in plastic, sealed in the new box was the WRONG power cable - instead of the little 2 female connector needed to plug into the power supply, the power cord was a standard PC power cable that needless to say would not fit.... To make a long long long story short - It took me till today (Nov 11th!!) to get the right power cords from WD (after jumping through god knows how many hoops). I plugged it in and surprise surprise... DOA! unbelievable! I contacted provantage and am currently awaiting my RMA - which I am NOT returning for a product replacement but rather for my money back...Who knows how long it might take to get one that A) has the right components in the box from the manufacturer and B) would work once it did.... what a joke. I can't say weather the other reviews of the fan being super loud - 11 days with the product and I have not been able to get it to work...thus I will never find out. I advise anyone thinking of getting this device NOT to do it. I have decided to get a real solution, a Fibernetix 605 from [...] ... check it out.
Great idea. Pretty package. Lousy design.
The first time the internal fan came on I laughed at how loud it was.
The second time the fan came on.. I didn't laugh.
It is like having a hair dryer on your dekstop.
Do not buy until WD works out this issuse.
I called them today and the best advice they could give was
"I guess you ought to keep the drive cool" !
Come on guys..
My LaCie 1 TB USB drive is whisper quiet. All the time.
The issue is one that I have had with two of the three systems I have tried it on; there is a compatibility issue between the USB system and the raid controller; the Pro II series have two drives, and an internal raid controller that determines how the storage is laid out, and how the disk devices are presented.
While most systems can identify and use USB hard drives without a special driver, the PRO II requires the raid controller be working before the standard disk drivers can see the USB devices for the internal drives. Once those devices can be seen, the normal driver for disk i/o is used.
I've spent two weeks now with WD support on the issue, and they are not even going to look at it. Its their position that since the device works with some USB controllers and not others, that its up to the USB controller manufacturer to address the issue.
Of course, the USB manufacturer believes that since the USB controller works fine with all sorts of other devices, including other Western Digital disks, the problem is with the Western Digital Driver.
I'd consider looking into a single-drive solution. The segate 750gb external solution has a single drive, and is about 2/3rd the cost. It also has a 5 year, rather than a 1 year, warranty. WD also has single drive external solutions that do not have the raid controller compatibility issue.
1) The fan is very noisy,
2) I had a *catastrophic* failure within few days of purchase,
3) you need a driver to use this drive,
4) I tried updating the firmware to 1.4 to deal with the noise - it failed every time I tried it.
If jet aircraft are southing to you, this is your drive. If a dental drill does not bother you will playing music, this is your drive.
This drive is insanely and obnoxiously loud.
I had 3 and returned them. The LaCie drives are a better value and are quiet.
Strieght to the point, yes the fan is loud (when it kicks on) than one commonly experiences but it may be tolerable, I suppose I have worked with computers for many years and have seen other similar product with cooling fans, such as my Epson printer, it has its own cooling fan that kicks on. But for some that operate in piece and quite and use this for real time file access all the time, it may be very annoying.
Another note like the review below is that he recieved the wrong power plug, well, guess what, I too recieved a 3 prong computer cable, but, more importantly I did have a matching 3 prong power adapter for my ProII (It is the single drive MyBook that has the 2 prong power adapter!). Also interesting to note is that I bought 2 WD MyBooks, and although the boxes did have all the cables, each box clearly had different grades of cables, wraped differently, mind you these were new seal from factory boxes. I strongly feel that this points out that the resources WD is using for its MyBook are abit unorganined to say the least.
RAID software failed to install on a Powerbook G4 laptop, error reported (OSX needs to be latest version?), additionally the install disk appears to missing some of the Mac install software! Next tried with my VAIO desktop, and eveything connected, but there is no visible drive in my computer. Discovered that ProII is formated in HPFS+ (Mac compatable only), so XP users MUST format over to NTFS and then the drive can be used by both Mac and PC.
WD does have a firmware update for the fan noise that modifies the behavior, another user reportedly flipped the fan inside the case that changed the pitch of the fan noise. Other than that anyone that have a modern PC or Mac tower has heard the cooling fans kick in, well that is the gist of the sound you can expect, although perhaps a differnt pitch becuase of the smaller diameter of the fan in the ProII.
Final thought, the fan is not that bad, I would rather have a well built data solution that did have cooling, this is your precious data your talking about. As for the difficulty installing, that is left to be desired.
UPDATE
Hmmm, dive does spin up for no reason as other have mentioned, possibly due to file table maintenance or something like that... perhaps XP restore logging in the background causeing this, cooling fan does kick on because of this, typically only lasts for 5 minutes, but as I type it is carrying on for quite awhile.
Caution, I thought I could tolerate the noise but with the unit auto spinning up for no reason and then having the fan come on, it does get annoying.
I just received my WD 1TB ProII. Works fine on WinXP under USB 2.0. Firewire 400 will not work. I have 3 other Maxtor OneTouch II and III's so am used to working with Firewire. Fan is incredibly noisy, read comments on WD Online Forum and you'll see others have same complaint. My Maxtor OneTouchIII's are virtually silent in comparison. Unable to update firmware for fan noise and I see on forums others are having same problem with drive detection. I wanted the WD for the 3yr warranty and self-replacement that Maxtor OneTouchIII's don't have but this WD product is not ready for mainstream. Unable to get through to phone support and been 3 days and no response on email. Going to return drive ASAP and get another Maxtor OneTouch 1TB. Warning, buy this model at your own risk. Good luck to those who are lucky enough to get a stable unit that works.
When I purchased this item I was really torn about which decision to make. On the one hand, Western Digital is know as one of the top hard drive manufacturers, and since I have had hard drive failures from 2 Lacie externals, 1 Maxtor external, and 1 Maxtor internal, and have had about 5 Western Digital hard drives last for years, I decided to go with the Western Digital drive. Another feature that led me to purchasing this product is the fact that it is made so that the owner can dismantle the case and easily replace a hard drive if it goes bad. On the other hand, the reviews for this product are really pretty poor.
Concerning installation: This product was a breeze to install, and changing it from RAID 0 to RAID 1 was simple using the provided software.
Concerning fan noice: I've seen reviews describe the noise as very loud like a leaf blower to as loud as a hair dryer. In my opinion it's as loud as a very small hair dryer. It was loud enough that I could not fall asleep when it was on, and one night it would not stop for some reason and I had to unplug it from the wall!
Concerning reliability: Well, again the individual hard drives appear to be very reliable and fast, which is pretty much standard for Western Digital. However, the firmware update failed rendering the product useless. Fortunately I was able to dismantle the product, remove the hard drives, and recover my data.
Summary: I would not purchase this drive until significant improvements are made to it in the areas of reliability and fan noise.
Not sure what all the fuss is about - I can barely hear the fan while it is on in my unit. When connecting the drive, the reason your computer may have difficulty finding it is because the My Book drive needs to be formatted first. Jury is still out on how well I can edit HDV video but it only took about 15 minutes to copy a 22 gig file from my internal hard drive to this unit using USB 2.0.
Will keep you posted.
I was very excited after I ordered and received the My Book Pro II. I set it up to use RAID mirroring. Unfortunately, within two months, one of the hard drives inside failed on me. I was hoping that Western Digital drives had become more reliable in the years since I last used them and wrote them off, but I have been disappointed on that front. I am going back to Seagate, as their drives have performed much more reliably for me.
I read the negative reviews here, but due to good experiences in the past with WD including wishing to replace my current 250 Gig light up WD USB drive, I thought I'd take the plunge.
As expected I don't really see what the problem is! The styling and build quality is high. It has triple interfaces - so if you have FireWire 800 that is a big bonus!
The only negative I would give is one of the FireWire cables that should have been in the box was not in the box. I've saw other reviews where the cables where missing or mixed up so finding one cable missing did not please me.
I think the drive is great in terms of performance, styling and price.
My biggest concern when buying was all the bad reviews about noise. The drive most of the time is completely silent and if after a certain time it detects no usage, it switches itself off completely. If I copy a DVD to the drive from a slow DVD drive, then the fan does not kick in. If I copy a DVD to the drive from a fast DVD drive, the fan does kick in. And yes it is noisy but not as bad as people have made out. The only caveat I'd add is that I have a suspicion it has another fan stage which is very noisy. My father said when he used the drive to copy 80gig from another hard drive onto it, he could he it in the next room. Western Digital now offer a firmware upgrade (see their site) to try and reduce the noise by increasingly the temperature at which the fan comes in, and which also shuts it off quicker. Personally I'd rather have cool running drives and some noise, so I've opted not to do the firmware upgrade.
As regards the other reviewer saying his broke within 10 days, that can happen with any item. The Canon DSLR broke which I got from Amazon the first week! But that did not stop me getting another one! I've already had this drive on 4 plane journeys and even though it is not built for such travel it is fine.
On the technical front: Windows XP would not see the drive without installing the RAID manager software that comes with it and using it to format the drive (I went to NTFS). After which RAID manager could be uninstalled and then every PC it was plugged into could see it.
I'm very happy with the purchase but will knock off one star for the noise (which I'm not too bothered about) and for the missing firewire cable. I'd certainly not consider another manufacturer (I looked at the others).
As someone who is digitizing my CD collection losslessly
(using EAC to extract from my commercial CDs, and FLAC
to compress), I was already pushing 1T with the two
500-gig WD My Books I already have. They deserve 5 stars;
if I give this product 4, it is because of the noise
from the fan: irritating when it is cooling, but since
I play my music loudly, and have become more used to
the background noise, I don't see it as too big an issue.
With a four-port USB 2.0 hub, I use one port for my external
soundcard, leaving three ports: the two 500 gig My Books,
and the 1T My Book Pro. That's 2T !
It of course has firewire, so eventually I may use that
and free up a USB port. Until then, for the cost -- 300
dollars less than the Maxtor 1T -- I feel very satisfied.
Now I just have to rearrange things so all the external
hard drives are in some quiet cooling cabinet. . . .
I like the feature of the drive turning off when not used
for a period of time; this keeps it cooler, so less fan noise,
and you don't have to remember to switch it off, either. Of
course, the main computer loses track of the drives when it
goes into hibernation, but quickly regains info when they
switch back on. They don't tell you, but you DO have to
format the drive for XP when it arrives, otherwise the My Book
1T is not recognized. The software provided lets you choose
whether to use RAID or not; with RAID, it is of course only
500 gig. Since I backup all my music on DVDs, I do not need
RAID, so I have all 1T available for music!
I admit at first I was very concerned about the noise the device generated. It sounded like a hair dryer on high a few feet from your head. After I upgraded to firmware version 104 the fan noise is still noticible but is much much quieter.
I think overall this is a very good drive. The RAID feature is very convenient. No more having to backup the drive since it does it automatically.
Bottom line it is that it is a good value and the after the firmware upgrade it is very acceptable fan level.
Just purchased mine and fired it up. Plan is to use it for recording HD content - 100+ hours available on this unit, huge plus! While doing a test recording, the [now] famous fan kicked it and yes, it IS a presence in the room. My system is part of a home theater setup so un-necessary noise is to be avoided at all costs. Does it sound like a 747? No. It's about as loud as, and sounds like, a hair dryer being used in a closed bathroom down the hall, except that it's coming from that box in your room. I'll definitely have to check out the firmware upgrade to see if that helps, otherwise it'll have to go into a hush box of some kind or in another room.
Installation was no problem at all.
I was shocked how loud the fan was. I went to western digitals web page updated my firmware and now it is much better. I recomend everyond do this. Im using Windows vista Premium Home with it conected firewire!
Well I Have read up on this product and reviewed that there were a lot of complaints about the Hard drive's Fan being too loud, And I Thought it would be as loud as everyone said. It's Not That Bad. It's Very Easy To Use. I've Had a LaCie And Maxtor Which both did not work for me after I purchased a new PC. I can say that this was worth every Penny I spent on it. As Said The Fan is NOT As Loud As " Airplanes flying over " I'm so used to the sound it doesn't even bother me.
This is a great piece of precision equipment. 2 500gb HDs in either striped or mirror mode, provides with me with the biggest bang for my buck. So far it works great on both my PCs and my Macs, and allows me to store my entire media collection in one place (MP3s, Video).
This is an excellent drive, works very well with my Macbook Pro. I see that quite a few people have complained about the noise, but this is no longer an issue. WD released a firmware update that successfully addresses the issue by better modulating the speed the fan. When it is reading or writing constantly for a few minutes or more--which is to say it's working hard--the fan will kick in on high and it is admittedly rather noisy. With regular use however, the fan is not audible. I had to run the firmware update software myself, but I imagine that most shipping drives now already have the updated firmware.
This drive also operates in Raid 0 or Raid 1, you're choice. It's nice to have the choice of performance versus data backup.
Just received the My Book Pro II 1TB drive and I already had my expectations of the loud noise expressed by many reviewers here and in other retailer review pages.
For starters, Amazon has the best price and the free shipping and no tax is incredible. Cannot be beat.
Secondly, this machine is only "blow-dryer loud" when first booted up, than after 5 seconds, it is completely silent.
After transferring a 25gb folder from my C drive to the My Book, it only takes less than 20 minutes over Firewire 400. It hums softly during the middle of the transfer and quites down towards the end. My case fans are louder than this drive.
Overall, this is a great purchase for me. Looks sharp on my desk and is built rather well.
I needed an extra drive to completely backup my iMac, and then have some room leftover for other working files. This one does the trick and then some. Large storage, cheap price, but not cheap product.
This drive really needs to STFU. I am sending it TF back to Western Digital immediately. It's louder than all the recent Anna Nicole Smith media attention!
$500 may seem expensive for an ext hard drive, but data's valuable. I was actually in the market for two 500GB drives and planned to setup mirroring when I came across this -- job done at about the same price, in one cool package. I have a background in IT and saw a few too many hard drives die in my day (including one of my own) to just let all my precious data sit on my laptop without any backup mechanism in place. I bought this for its dual drive RAID (note: out of the box, it's configured with 1TB, so you have to install the software and reconfigure it--easy as pie). Hence, I get only 500GB of storage, but I know that I'll never lose that data -- if one drive fails, the other drive contains identical info. Performance is generally great. Both USB and Firewire 400 result in snappy transfer speeds. My only complaint: it gets very noisy on the occasion that you're downloading large files (like an episode of Lost from iTunes). Once that fan kicks in, you're in the cockpit of an airplane! But for the general day-to-day, it's silent, zippy and provides me with ease of mind. One note: from my experience, laptop hard drives are about twice as likely to fail than desktops. As such, I highly recommend some form of ext drive with a backup plan in place (this comes with Retrospect for the Mac, which does the job).
This drive is great! Partitioned it 750Gb for Vista on Mac Book Pro and 250Gb for Mac OSX backups. Zips along through firewire 800 . . . super!
BUT . . . its too LOUD. After 10 minutes I want to take poison! The frequency of the fan is enough to resonate the ear drum.
SO . . I have to return it! Darn, I like it so much. I rate this product as a 1/10. If it were not for the fan . . . 10/10.
I just got one of these last week to augment my storage needs for home. What a great drive! I really like the fact that it costs no more than what I would have to spend to get two 500GB drives and a case that supports hardware RAID 1. To me, running with the peace of mind that I have a mirror is of great benefit wih this drive compared to a single drive and running in RAID 0 (striped) mode. Also, when run on Firewire 800, it is a very speedy drive. I am a photographer and use Apple's Aperture and Photoshop all the time. I have moved my Aperture photo library to the WD drive and it is nice and fast. I would not attribute any slowdowns to the drive. Photoshop behaves the same. As to the noise, I don't hear it. Sure, it is there when you first turn it on, but subsides within 5 seconds, as another reviewer has mentioned. Maybe the noise gets drowned out by the noise of my G5 PowerMac, not sure. Ok, what are the cons? Not much, but I would say that the one negative is that it is bulky. I own another FW800 enclosure that has two disks and it is half of the WD's size. I like this drive so much that I just bought two more. I was going to go the more expensive eSATA RAID array route (would have run me $2k+ for 1.5-2TB, but no more. These drives will do just fine.
I wanted the WD My Book II to back up years of pictures and DV. I read the reviews of just about every similar 1TB hard drive. Finally I selected the WD. The setup was simple, even the change from the Mac OS to Windows NTFS. The concern of the fan noise was non-existent. I've had the unit now for 3 days and everything is 100% perfect.. I'm satisfied.
Besides being extremely noisy even after firmware upgrade the enclosure IS NOT metallic it is just a plastic enclosure covered with grey paper...
Very disappointed...
LOUD! LOUD! LOUD!
Believe the reviews!
I have a Mac Mini in my upstairs office. Nice and quiet. I have 3 other external drives. All fairly quiet. This thing sounded like a hair dryer. My wife asked me if everything was ok in my office because "it sounds like something is about to launch!" So I updated the firmware per the WD website to lessen the fan noise. Now the drive doesn't even mount! I call WD tech support. The first guy I talk to chuckles when I mention that the copy on the box claims this drive is "remarkably quiet." He said "yeah, not this drive." I get transferred to advanced tech support. We run some tests and determine that the firmware upgrade essentially killed this drive. I can't even get it to power up. Nice. Glad I transferred my iTunes collection to it. Guess I get to rerip all my cds.
My advice? Look for something else. I have 2 other WD MyBook drives of smaller capacity that have worked just fine. This 1TB drive sucked from day 1. If you have any kind of drive activity at all the noise will make you crazy. I guess it's fine if you want to leave it turned off most the time.
Disappointing, the drive is very noisy, when you reboot the drive runs with the fan on high then shuts down. I would not recommend this drive to anyone.
This drive has performed well so far and I have no complaints. The fan is loud as described by other comments, but since I only use it to back up my PowerBook and 4 other FireWire drives I only have to put-up with it once a month.
amazon won't let me take away stars, but I'm calling this one a dud. Even with the firmware update the fan's howl-mode is just too much for me. I thought I could live with it but no way... which is too bad because in all other respects it's a really nice product. So back it goes.
Original review below:
---------------------
I got one hooked up through FW800 on my Powermac G5. It's as fast as the serial ATA factory drive according to Xbench. I copied about 300GB last night and yes the hairdryer went on full blast. This morning I updated the firmware (you have to dismount the drive first or else the utility won't find it, and you really should dismount and disconnect any other FW drives beforehand) so we'll see if that helped.
Since this is only going to be used for backup, and my backups run overnight, I really don't care about the noise. It's not like there's a Rolls-Royce Trent engine in the next room. But maybe the firmware update helps. It gets four instead of five stars however as the noise in another context would be unbearable.
In addition you do NOT need drivers for OS X, at least on Firewire (and who the heck would run USB if you have FW available?). The drive mounts as a single volume and I am not interested in the WD RAID software as in my experience such things from WD, Maxtor, Seagate et al tend to be buggy and in some cases recipes for disaster (coughMaxtorcough) so I do not install them. If you want to use the RAID 1 feature then you have to install the WD software. I also have two WD MyBook 500 Premium drives and they also do not require any drivers. Sure the frivolous "capacity gauge" doesn't work but who cares. The blue LEDs are twice as bright with the drivers installed and it was annoying so I removed the drivers.
I don't know what the fuss is all about about this unit's "fan noise"... After the firmware update, if one bothers to do o it, the fan noise level is really trivial compared to advantages of HUGE storage space (or data redundancy if one should choose to use RAID 1). The sound of the fan is about as loud as a fan from a PC workstation (one of those DELL Precisions or MacPro/PowerMacs).
One of the things I wish could be different about the unit is if the RAID configuration could be more easily managed by using Apple's Disk Utility instead of using WD's own proprietary software (which requires a reboot... an annoying thing on Mac OSX.4 which I almost NEVER EVER have to reboot). And then the button manager requires yet another reboot before the functionality can be fully utilized... HELLO, Western Digital... Mac is no Microsoft Windows where users are used to rebooting often! If you want more of Mac users' business, write your apps like a true OSX app... At most I should be able to just log out and then log back in to use the functionalities...
Other than that, the unit is a work horse. I use SuperDuper to backup my Mac and so far have had no issues at all with it...
I have tried three of these MyBooks and each one has the same problem...file errors. The problem is it turns on and off by itself and if you leave it on and then decide to copy files over it will copy the files and then won't allow you access to them! It is a real piece of garbage. Western Digital should be sued over this useless, hack of an external hard drive. Don't trust your data to this because you will be sorry.
I picked on of these up at CompUSA which is closing many of it's stores. Yes there is fan noise but what do you expect it is a RAID. You are writing and reading data at a very fast rate would you rather fry the drives? The drive does not need to sit right next to you. Set it farther back if it bothers you. If you want to hear what real fan noise is sit in a server room for a few hours configuring multiple drive RAIDS and have a few dozen servers around you. That is what I call fan noise. This thing is nothing. It provides redundancy (Raid 1) at a very good cost point. Personally I would only recommend RAID 1. If you run at Raid 0 and loose one drive you loose all your data. This is not Raid 5 which will allow you to loose one drive and keep on going. So my advice is if you need fast and large amounts of storage with fail over (Raid 1) then this is the product for you.
When shopping for external storage, I wanted something that not only provided a lot of GB's for my dollar, but would also provide redundancy. After all, an external hard drive is no more reliable than the internal drive in your computer, and I've had far too many hard drive crashes and lost data to have it happen again.
This device is a perfect combination. In RAID 1 configuration, each of the unit's two disk drives contains an exact copy of the data, so that if one fails you need only replace one drive and rest easy, because the data is safely stored on the secondary disk. I also read that Western Digital will send out a replacement drive so you can replace it yourself, eliminating the need to send your precious remaining drive to some factory somewhere. Just keep in mind that with this configuration, you have only 500 GB of storage since both of the disks contain the same data.
I also wanted the triple interface. I have a couple of Macs with Firewire 400 ports, and I have a PC with USB 2.0. Someday if I buy a newer Mac it may have Firewire 800, and this external drive is ready for them all.
It took only a minute to install the software on my Mac Book Pro, and most of that time was spent doing a reboot (an unfortunate drawback, and the first time that I've ever had to reboot after installing new software).
ABOUT THE NOISE: There are a lot of negative comments about the noise, but considering all of the benefits I went ahead and took the plunge. And boy am I PLEASED with that decision! There is a brief power-up fan noise when the device is first connected to power, but after that it is whisper quiet. As I type this review, I'm in the middle of moving 20 GB of old files to the drive and there is no noise whatsoever.
There are a few drawbacks too. The marketing literature promotes the unit's capacity meter built into the from LED indicator. You must have the drive connected to a computer with the driver installed for this feature to work, making it mostly worthless in my case (where I connect to multiple computers, some with no drivers installed). Sometimes the drive goes to sleep upon long period of inactivity, and takes 5-10 seconds to wake again. This is a minor annoyance, but nowhere near a deal breaker.
Here are my positives and negatives:
PROS
- Great amount of storage for the price
- RAID 1 means no more lost data
- WD offers advance replacement of failed disks
- Triple interface offers excellent flexibility
- Whisper quiet, aside from brief power-on fan noise
CONS
- Capacity meter is mostly useless
- Drive sleeps on long inactivity and wakes slowly
CONCLUSION
Overall I would highly recommend this drive to anyone looking for external storage with built in redundancy at a great price. I feel 100% confident in knowing that my data is properly mirrored and the digital content (in which I have invested money) is also safe for years to come.
Their 500 GB model is excellent. This model has all the same great features but is loud enough to be annoying. It is a great back up option for infrequent use. For daily use I would look elsewhere. I regret this noisy purchase.
Great drive just makes a lot of noise from the fan... You would think for the price that you pay for this drive that WD would have thought of making this quiter.
Western Digital 1 TB My Book Pro II External Hard Drive with Triple Interface ( WDG2TP10000N )
Sure is louder than I'd like - my wife as well - but the idea of having 20 years of collected computer files in one place is really appealing. Plenty fast. Sleek design. Lots of options - and all the correct cables. Had a problem during installation that was quickly fixed by calling WD support people - the drive was not "initialized," which took about three hours to accomplish.
Purchased three of these drives for a special project where we had to have three copies of large amount of data. Cleanly unmounting the drive in Windows would render the data unreadable next time the disk was mounted on ALL THREE DRIVES and on any Mac, Windows or Linux PC. chkdsk repaired one disk once. Thereafter, the only way to get at this data was using OnTrack software to recover it to a different drive. We bought three LaCie 1 TB "Big Disk" triple interface drives and returned the WDs. The LaCie's work flawlessly. AVOID these WD drives at all costs - at least until they figure out whatever is wrong with their chipset firmware.
I record EWTN TV programs a week in advance and at my leasure play and watch what I want on my PC from anywhere in the world. I hitched my Western Digital 1 TB My Book Pro II External Hard Drive to an APC device and never have to worry about it going down! With this drive I could finally get rid of my VCR and my TV. It has the capacity to hold thousands of TV programs.
I was excited to find this. On paper it looked like exactly what I had been looking for.
The unit made all the loud "launching" sounds as described elsewhere, but would not communicate at all with my network. Documentation is next to nothing. Only comments in the documentation on the failure of the software to find the unit is "check to see if power is on" and "check to see if network cable is attached". This is supposed to be helpful? Phone support not available during the evening.
After wasting several hours wrestling with this I gave up in frustration. Returned it.
J and R Music World computer world had very fast deliver. I like the first one so much I bought 3 more.
The unit stopped working after 15 minutes of use, when at the advice of the customer service, applied the latest firware upgrade to reduce the fan noise. The firmware upgrade killed the whole system and turned the device into a brick.
I was told to call a different number to get a new replacement unit. The customer service was polite but told me that the replacement unit they are going to send will be a refurbished and not a new unit. Also, any shipping charges to thier facility will be my responsibility even though the unit was only 1 day old.
I agreed to their demand as I had no other options. I opted for advance replacement and was told that they will authorize a credit card amount of $599.00 to be charged to my account (even though they would be sending the refurbished unit and the fair market value for the product is less than $400). I agreed to these conditions also. They then told me that for some unknown reason they cannot create an Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA) so they are going to give me a case number. Someone should get back to me with an RMA within the next 24 hours.
I have been waiting for five days, no sign of any communications with them. I called them everyday. Their reply was we are really surprised nobody called you or send an e-mail. We have already send it to people in California and they should respond. Maybe you should wait another day.
After 5 days of frustruation, I finally created a standard RMA online. Let see how fast they are going to ship the product back to me.
I wish Amazon had zero star ranking. The Western Digital does not deserve even one star
Western Digital 1 TB My Book Pro II External Hard Drive with Triple Interface ( WDG2TP10000N )I own a G-5/ Dual processor.and 16,000 CD's .I finished migrating this collection yesterday.and finally got a chanch to take it down the block.Combined with I Tunes, the collection take about 9 seconds to find any song/artist or album
This music library takes up 897 Gb can you imagine!!.I have 511 days of straight playing time 24/7/with no repeat.I can tuck it under my arm 8 lbs I'm building a travel case for it
I can set it up to play any way I like. genres, artist, alphabetically time,duration, Not for the PC hearted
All thats missing is voice control I have 100 Gb left, by the way, easy to use, if you know Mac and Itunes
A very serious piece of music equipment.I suggest you buy 2. 1 for back up under $400 each w/ shipping
I'll be adding at least 77 new Gb's soon...does anybody know if there is a 5 TB unit around
My copy of the 1TB My Book Pro II drive is *silent*! I've been a software engineer for 25 years and am used to all kinds of fan noise coming from many different types of computers and disk drives, including massive ones. Even though I read the reviews from last year that complained about the noise that they experienced from the WD drive, I figured I could probably handle it, so I just purchased the 1TB drive and have been using it about 15 hours a day for the past two weeks. The only noise I hear is for the first seven seconds, when there's a loud whir. Then the whirring stops and the drive is silent. When I am storing/retrieving a lot of stuff on the drive the fan does start up after several minutes of activity, but it's quieter than the fan in my laptop and even that stops a short time later.
Perhaps Western Digital fixed the hardware and/or the driver; perhaps I was fortunate and got a copy that doesn't have the problem. I use it attached to the Firewire port on my Macintosh PowerBook G4 running OSX 10.4.9. It was trivial to install, being preformatted for an Apple; all I had to do was install the driver off of the CD and plug in the drive. Up it came, ready for use. I can only say that I am a *very* satisfied customer with a silent home office and a very large amount of storage for all of my photographs.
I little heavy, but better then all the cd's and dvd's that I would be carrying.
The only thing I wish is that I bought the network one. This would allow me to share my files to my other computer easier when I'm back in town.
Great, easy to install and us. Provided not only a USB, but the 400 & 800 Firewire cables
I don't understand all the complaining about the noise. While I was transferring about 250GB of files it was nearly dead quiet. Now I may be a little biased as I'm running a system that is a lot beefier than most home users. I have a complete Raid 1 system with two 74 GB 10,000 RPM Raptors for my OS (XP Pro) and two 250 GB drives for my files. To keep the Raptors cool, each one comes with its own fan case complete with LED temperature readouts. Now that system kicks out some serious fan noise! On hot days it's like a jet engine next to my ear and my computers tucked away underneath my work station!
Before plugging in the drive I installed their RAID Manager software from the setup disk that came included. It immediately recognized the drives and I followed its prompts to reformat the drives to RAID 1 NTFS. It took about two minutes which made me quite suspicious because I'd never heard of formatting a hard drive to NTFS in two minutes. Sure enough my system couldn't find the drive. After reconnecting the wires and rebooting it still couldn't find the drive.
It was clear that the drive was working but not being recognized by my OS so I went into the admin tools and formatted that drive the proper way (Note: my computer/control panel/admin tools/computer management/disc management...Look for the drive that has a BIG BLACK BAR and right click to start reformatting...however DON"T TOUCH THE DRIVES WITH BLUE BARS. These are already formatted and you'll erase all of your files.)
Works perfect now, nice and quiet and no problems yet . Why they include the completely useless RAID management software is beyond me as all it does is trick you into thinking you've actually formatted your hard drive when you haven't which in turn set's you off to troubleshooting the wrong problem. I'm fairly experienced with these things and I was stumped for a bit. If a newbie got this drive they'd probably conclude it was broken and send it back as there is no documentation with the drive or at the WD website about the proper procedure to set this up.
I agree with Becky B ... My drive does make a whir type of noise when it starts up . I think my Dell XPS is louder when all 5 fans are running . In 10 hours of use I heard it come on 3 times it didnt stay on for long maybe 3-5 minutes tops . As far as writting speed not bad Can't complain MP3 collection was a breeze to transfer . I give this a 4 out of 5 good product .. The metal cage is warm to the touch but you wont be burning yourhands anytime soon :)
Great, easy to install and us. Provided not only a USB, but the 400 & 800 Firewire cables
I don't understand all the complaining about the noise. While I was transferring about 250GB of files it was nearly dead quiet. Now I may be a little biased as I'm running a system that is a lot beefier than most home users. I have a complete Raid 1 system with two 74 GB 10,000 RPM Raptors for my OS (XP Pro) and two 250 GB drives for my files. To keep the Raptors cool, each one comes with its own fan case complete with LED temperature readouts. Now that system kicks out some serious fan noise! On hot days it's like a jet engine next to my ear and my computers tucked away underneath my work station!
Before plugging in the drive I installed their RAID Manager software from the setup disk that came included. It immediately recognized the drives and I followed its prompts to reformat the drives to RAID 1 NTFS. It took about two minutes which made me quite suspicious because I'd never heard of formatting a hard drive to NTFS in two minutes. Sure enough my system couldn't find the drive. After reconnecting the wires and rebooting it still couldn't find the drive.
It was clear that the drive was working but not being recognized by my OS so I went into the admin tools and formatted that drive the proper way (Note: my computer/control panel/admin tools/computer management/disc management...Look for the drive that has a BIG BLACK BAR and right click to start reformatting...however DON"T TOUCH THE DRIVES WITH BLUE BARS. These are already formatted and you'll erase all of your files.)
Works perfect now, nice and quiet and no problems yet . Why they include the completely useless RAID management software is beyond me as all it does is trick you into thinking you've actually formatted your hard drive when you haven't which in turn set's you off to troubleshooting the wrong problem. I'm fairly experienced with these things and I was stumped for a bit. If a newbie got this drive they'd probably conclude it was broken and send it back as there is no documentation with the drive or at the WD website about the proper procedure to set this up.
I agree with Becky B ... My drive does make a whir type of noise when it starts up . I think my Dell XPS is louder when all 5 fans are running . In 10 hours of use I heard it come on 3 times it didnt stay on for long maybe 3-5 minutes tops . As far as writting speed not bad Can't complain MP3 collection was a breeze to transfer . I give this a 4 out of 5 good product .. The metal cage is warm to the touch but you wont be burning yourhands anytime soon :)
My copy of the 1TB My Book Pro II drive is *silent*! I've been a software engineer for 25 years and am used to all kinds of fan noise coming from many different types of computers and disk drives, including massive ones. Even though I read the reviews from last year that complained about the noise that they experienced from the WD drive, I figured I could probably handle it, so I just purchased the 1TB drive and have been using it about 15 hours a day for the past two weeks. The only noise I hear is for the first seven seconds, when there's a loud whir. Then the whirring stops and the drive is silent. When I am storing/retrieving a lot of stuff on the drive the fan does start up after several minutes of activity, but it's quieter than the fan in my laptop and even that stops a short time later.
Perhaps Western Digital fixed the hardware and/or the driver; perhaps I was fortunate and got a copy that doesn't have the problem. I use it attached to the Firewire port on my Macintosh PowerBook G4 running OSX 10.4.9. It was trivial to install, being preformatted for an Apple; all I had to do was install the driver off of the CD and plug in the drive. Up it came, ready for use. I can only say that I am a *very* satisfied customer with a silent home office and a very large amount of storage for all of my photographs.
I little heavy, but better then all the cd's and dvd's that I would be carrying.
The only thing I wish is that I bought the network one. This would allow me to share my files to my other computer easier when I'm back in town.
Western Digital 1 TB My Book Pro II External Hard Drive with Triple Interface ( WDG2TP10000N )I own a G-5/ Dual processor.and 16,000 CD's .I finished migrating this collection yesterday.and finally got a chanch to take it down the block.Combined with I Tunes, the collection take about 9 seconds to find any song/artist or album
This music library takes up 897 Gb can you imagine!!.I have 511 days of straight playing time 24/7/with no repeat.I can tuck it under my arm 8 lbs I'm building a travel case for it
I can set it up to play any way I like. genres, artist, alphabetically time,duration, Not for the PC hearted
All thats missing is voice control I have 100 Gb left, by the way, easy to use, if you know Mac and Itunes
A very serious piece of music equipment.I suggest you buy 2. 1 for back up under $400 each w/ shipping
I'll be adding at least 77 new Gb's soon...does anybody know if there is a 5 TB unit around
J and R Music World computer world had very fast deliver. I like the first one so much I bought 3 more.
The unit stopped working after 15 minutes of use, when at the advice of the customer service, applied the latest firware upgrade to reduce the fan noise. The firmware upgrade killed the whole system and turned the device into a brick.
I was told to call a different number to get a new replacement unit. The customer service was polite but told me that the replacement unit they are going to send will be a refurbished and not a new unit. Also, any shipping charges to thier facility will be my responsibility even though the unit was only 1 day old.
I agreed to their demand as I had no other options. I opted for advance replacement and was told that they will authorize a credit card amount of $599.00 to be charged to my account (even though they would be sending the refurbished unit and the fair market value for the product is less than $400). I agreed to these conditions also. They then told me that for some unknown reason they cannot create an Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA) so they are going to give me a case number. Someone should get back to me with an RMA within the next 24 hours.
I have been waiting for five days, no sign of any communications with them. I called them everyday. Their reply was we are really surprised nobody called you or send an e-mail. We have already send it to people in California and they should respond. Maybe you should wait another day.
After 5 days of frustruation, I finally created a standard RMA online. Let see how fast they are going to ship the product back to me.
I wish Amazon had zero star ranking. The Western Digital does not deserve even one star
I record EWTN TV programs a week in advance and at my leasure play and watch what I want on my PC from anywhere in the world. I hitched my Western Digital 1 TB My Book Pro II External Hard Drive to an APC device and never have to worry about it going down! With this drive I could finally get rid of my VCR and my TV. It has the capacity to hold thousands of TV programs.
I was excited to find this. On paper it looked like exactly what I had been looking for.
The unit made all the loud "launching" sounds as described elsewhere, but would not communicate at all with my network. Documentation is next to nothing. Only comments in the documentation on the failure of the software to find the unit is "check to see if power is on" and "check to see if network cable is attached". This is supposed to be helpful? Phone support not available during the evening.
After wasting several hours wrestling with this I gave up in frustration. Returned it.
Their 500 GB model is excellent. This model has all the same great features but is loud enough to be annoying. It is a great back up option for infrequent use. For daily use I would look elsewhere. I regret this noisy purchase.
Great drive just makes a lot of noise from the fan... You would think for the price that you pay for this drive that WD would have thought of making this quiter.
Western Digital 1 TB My Book Pro II External Hard Drive with Triple Interface ( WDG2TP10000N )
Sure is louder than I'd like - my wife as well - but the idea of having 20 years of collected computer files in one place is really appealing. Plenty fast. Sleek design. Lots of options - and all the correct cables. Had a problem during installation that was quickly fixed by calling WD support people - the drive was not "initialized," which took about three hours to accomplish.
Purchased three of these drives for a special project where we had to have three copies of large amount of data. Cleanly unmounting the drive in Windows would render the data unreadable next time the disk was mounted on ALL THREE DRIVES and on any Mac, Windows or Linux PC. chkdsk repaired one disk once. Thereafter, the only way to get at this data was using OnTrack software to recover it to a different drive. We bought three LaCie 1 TB "Big Disk" triple interface drives and returned the WDs. The LaCie's work flawlessly. AVOID these WD drives at all costs - at least until they figure out whatever is wrong with their chipset firmware.
When shopping for external storage, I wanted something that not only provided a lot of GB's for my dollar, but would also provide redundancy. After all, an external hard drive is no more reliable than the internal drive in your computer, and I've had far too many hard drive crashes and lost data to have it happen again.
This device is a perfect combination. In RAID 1 configuration, each of the unit's two disk drives contains an exact copy of the data, so that if one fails you need only replace one drive and rest easy, because the data is safely stored on the secondary disk. I also read that Western Digital will send out a replacement drive so you can replace it yourself, eliminating the need to send your precious remaining drive to some factory somewhere. Just keep in mind that with this configuration, you have only 500 GB of storage since both of the disks contain the same data.
I also wanted the triple interface. I have a couple of Macs with Firewire 400 ports, and I have a PC with USB 2.0. Someday if I buy a newer Mac it may have Firewire 800, and this external drive is ready for them all.
It took only a minute to install the software on my Mac Book Pro, and most of that time was spent doing a reboot (an unfortunate drawback, and the first time that I've ever had to reboot after installing new software).
ABOUT THE NOISE: There are a lot of negative comments about the noise, but considering all of the benefits I went ahead and took the plunge. And boy am I PLEASED with that decision! There is a brief power-up fan noise when the device is first connected to power, but after that it is whisper quiet. As I type this review, I'm in the middle of moving 20 GB of old files to the drive and there is no noise whatsoever.
There are a few drawbacks too. The marketing literature promotes the unit's capacity meter built into the from LED indicator. You must have the drive connected to a computer with the driver installed for this feature to work, making it mostly worthless in my case (where I connect to multiple computers, some with no drivers installed). Sometimes the drive goes to sleep upon long period of inactivity, and takes 5-10 seconds to wake again. This is a minor annoyance, but nowhere near a deal breaker.
Here are my positives and negatives:
PROS
- Great amount of storage for the price
- RAID 1 means no more lost data
- WD offers advance replacement of failed disks
- Triple interface offers excellent flexibility
- Whisper quiet, aside from brief power-on fan noise
CONS
- Capacity meter is mostly useless
- Drive sleeps on long inactivity and wakes slowly
CONCLUSION
Overall I would highly recommend this drive to anyone looking for external storage with built in redundancy at a great price. I feel 100% confident in knowing that my data is properly mirrored and the digital content (in which I have invested money) is also safe for years to come.
I have tried three of these MyBooks and each one has the same problem...file errors. The problem is it turns on and off by itself and if you leave it on and then decide to copy files over it will copy the files and then won't allow you access to them! It is a real piece of garbage. Western Digital should be sued over this useless, hack of an external hard drive. Don't trust your data to this because you will be sorry.
I picked on of these up at CompUSA which is closing many of it's stores. Yes there is fan noise but what do you expect it is a RAID. You are writing and reading data at a very fast rate would you rather fry the drives? The drive does not need to sit right next to you. Set it farther back if it bothers you. If you want to hear what real fan noise is sit in a server room for a few hours configuring multiple drive RAIDS and have a few dozen servers around you. That is what I call fan noise. This thing is nothing. It provides redundancy (Raid 1) at a very good cost point. Personally I would only recommend RAID 1. If you run at Raid 0 and loose one drive you loose all your data. This is not Raid 5 which will allow you to loose one drive and keep on going. So my advice is if you need fast and large amounts of storage with fail over (Raid 1) then this is the product for you.
I don't know what the fuss is all about about this unit's "fan noise"... After the firmware update, if one bothers to do o it, the fan noise level is really trivial compared to advantages of HUGE storage space (or data redundancy if one should choose to use RAID 1). The sound of the fan is about as loud as a fan from a PC workstation (one of those DELL Precisions or MacPro/PowerMacs).
One of the things I wish could be different about the unit is if the RAID configuration could be more easily managed by using Apple's Disk Utility instead of using WD's own proprietary software (which requires a reboot... an annoying thing on Mac OSX.4 which I almost NEVER EVER have to reboot). And then the button manager requires yet another reboot before the functionality can be fully utilized... HELLO, Western Digital... Mac is no Microsoft Windows where users are used to rebooting often! If you want more of Mac users' business, write your apps like a true OSX app... At most I should be able to just log out and then log back in to use the functionalities...
Other than that, the unit is a work horse. I use SuperDuper to backup my Mac and so far have had no issues at all with it...
LOUD! LOUD! LOUD!
Believe the reviews!
I have a Mac Mini in my upstairs office. Nice and quiet. I have 3 other external drives. All fairly quiet. This thing sounded like a hair dryer. My wife asked me if everything was ok in my office because "it sounds like something is about to launch!" So I updated the firmware per the WD website to lessen the fan noise. Now the drive doesn't even mount! I call WD tech support. The first guy I talk to chuckles when I mention that the copy on the box claims this drive is "remarkably quiet." He said "yeah, not this drive." I get transferred to advanced tech support. We run some tests and determine that the firmware upgrade essentially killed this drive. I can't even get it to power up. Nice. Glad I transferred my iTunes collection to it. Guess I get to rerip all my cds.
My advice? Look for something else. I have 2 other WD MyBook drives of smaller capacity that have worked just fine. This 1TB drive sucked from day 1. If you have any kind of drive activity at all the noise will make you crazy. I guess it's fine if you want to leave it turned off most the time.
Disappointing, the drive is very noisy, when you reboot the drive runs with the fan on high then shuts down. I would not recommend this drive to anyone.
This drive has performed well so far and I have no complaints. The fan is loud as described by other comments, but since I only use it to back up my PowerBook and 4 other FireWire drives I only have to put-up with it once a month.
amazon won't let me take away stars, but I'm calling this one a dud. Even with the firmware update the fan's howl-mode is just too much for me. I thought I could live with it but no way... which is too bad because in all other respects it's a really nice product. So back it goes.
Original review below:
---------------------
I got one hooked up through FW800 on my Powermac G5. It's as fast as the serial ATA factory drive according to Xbench. I copied about 300GB last night and yes the hairdryer went on full blast. This morning I updated the firmware (you have to dismount the drive first or else the utility won't find it, and you really should dismount and disconnect any other FW drives beforehand) so we'll see if that helped.
Since this is only going to be used for backup, and my backups run overnight, I really don't care about the noise. It's not like there's a Rolls-Royce Trent engine in the next room. But maybe the firmware update helps. It gets four instead of five stars however as the noise in another context would be unbearable.
In addition you do NOT need drivers for OS X, at least on Firewire (and who the heck would run USB if you have FW available?). The drive mounts as a single volume and I am not interested in the WD RAID software as in my experience such things from WD, Maxtor, Seagate et al tend to be buggy and in some cases recipes for disaster (coughMaxtorcough) so I do not install them. If you want to use the RAID 1 feature then you have to install the WD software. I also have two WD MyBook 500 Premium drives and they also do not require any drivers. Sure the frivolous "capacity gauge" doesn't work but who cares. The blue LEDs are twice as bright with the drivers installed and it was annoying so I removed the drivers.
Besides being extremely noisy even after firmware upgrade the enclosure IS NOT metallic it is just a plastic enclosure covered with grey paper...
Very disappointed...
I wanted the WD My Book II to back up years of pictures and DV. I read the reviews of just about every similar 1TB hard drive. Finally I selected the WD. The setup was simple, even the change from the Mac OS to Windows NTFS. The concern of the fan noise was non-existent. I've had the unit now for 3 days and everything is 100% perfect.. I'm satisfied.
I just got one of these last week to augment my storage needs for home. What a great drive! I really like the fact that it costs no more than what I would have to spend to get two 500GB drives and a case that supports hardware RAID 1. To me, running with the peace of mind that I have a mirror is of great benefit wih this drive compared to a single drive and running in RAID 0 (striped) mode. Also, when run on Firewire 800, it is a very speedy drive. I am a photographer and use Apple's Aperture and Photoshop all the time. I have moved my Aperture photo library to the WD drive and it is nice and fast. I would not attribute any slowdowns to the drive. Photoshop behaves the same. As to the noise, I don't hear it. Sure, it is there when you first turn it on, but subsides within 5 seconds, as another reviewer has mentioned. Maybe the noise gets drowned out by the noise of my G5 PowerMac, not sure. Ok, what are the cons? Not much, but I would say that the one negative is that it is bulky. I own another FW800 enclosure that has two disks and it is half of the WD's size. I like this drive so much that I just bought two more. I was going to go the more expensive eSATA RAID array route (would have run me $2k+ for 1.5-2TB, but no more. These drives will do just fine.
This drive is great! Partitioned it 750Gb for Vista on Mac Book Pro and 250Gb for Mac OSX backups. Zips along through firewire 800 . . . super!
BUT . . . its too LOUD. After 10 minutes I want to take poison! The frequency of the fan is enough to resonate the ear drum.
SO . . I have to return it! Darn, I like it so much. I rate this product as a 1/10. If it were not for the fan . . . 10/10.
This drive really needs to STFU. I am sending it TF back to Western Digital immediately. It's louder than all the recent Anna Nicole Smith media attention!
$500 may seem expensive for an ext hard drive, but data's valuable. I was actually in the market for two 500GB drives and planned to setup mirroring when I came across this -- job done at about the same price, in one cool package. I have a background in IT and saw a few too many hard drives die in my day (including one of my own) to just let all my precious data sit on my laptop without any backup mechanism in place. I bought this for its dual drive RAID (note: out of the box, it's configured with 1TB, so you have to install the software and reconfigure it--easy as pie). Hence, I get only 500GB of storage, but I know that I'll never lose that data -- if one drive fails, the other drive contains identical info. Performance is generally great. Both USB and Firewire 400 result in snappy transfer speeds. My only complaint: it gets very noisy on the occasion that you're downloading large files (like an episode of Lost from iTunes). Once that fan kicks in, you're in the cockpit of an airplane! But for the general day-to-day, it's silent, zippy and provides me with ease of mind. One note: from my experience, laptop hard drives are about twice as likely to fail than desktops. As such, I highly recommend some form of ext drive with a backup plan in place (this comes with Retrospect for the Mac, which does the job).
I needed an extra drive to completely backup my iMac, and then have some room leftover for other working files. This one does the trick and then some. Large storage, cheap price, but not cheap product.
Just received the My Book Pro II 1TB drive and I already had my expectations of the loud noise expressed by many reviewers here and in other retailer review pages.
For starters, Amazon has the best price and the free shipping and no tax is incredible. Cannot be beat.
Secondly, this machine is only "blow-dryer loud" when first booted up, than after 5 seconds, it is completely silent.
After transferring a 25gb folder from my C drive to the My Book, it only takes less than 20 minutes over Firewire 400. It hums softly during the middle of the transfer and quites down towards the end. My case fans are louder than this drive.
Overall, this is a great purchase for me. Looks sharp on my desk and is built rather well.
This is a great piece of precision equipment. 2 500gb HDs in either striped or mirror mode, provides with me with the biggest bang for my buck. So far it works great on both my PCs and my Macs, and allows me to store my entire media collection in one place (MP3s, Video).
This is an excellent drive, works very well with my Macbook Pro. I see that quite a few people have complained about the noise, but this is no longer an issue. WD released a firmware update that successfully addresses the issue by better modulating the speed the fan. When it is reading or writing constantly for a few minutes or more--which is to say it's working hard--the fan will kick in on high and it is admittedly rather noisy. With regular use however, the fan is not audible. I had to run the firmware update software myself, but I imagine that most shipping drives now already have the updated firmware.
This drive also operates in Raid 0 or Raid 1, you're choice. It's nice to have the choice of performance versus data backup.
I was shocked how loud the fan was. I went to western digitals web page updated my firmware and now it is much better. I recomend everyond do this. Im using Windows vista Premium Home with it conected firewire!
Well I Have read up on this product and reviewed that there were a lot of complaints about the Hard drive's Fan being too loud, And I Thought it would be as loud as everyone said. It's Not That Bad. It's Very Easy To Use. I've Had a LaCie And Maxtor Which both did not work for me after I purchased a new PC. I can say that this was worth every Penny I spent on it. As Said The Fan is NOT As Loud As " Airplanes flying over " I'm so used to the sound it doesn't even bother me.
I admit at first I was very concerned about the noise the device generated. It sounded like a hair dryer on high a few feet from your head. After I upgraded to firmware version 104 the fan noise is still noticible but is much much quieter.
I think overall this is a very good drive. The RAID feature is very convenient. No more having to backup the drive since it does it automatically.
Bottom line it is that it is a good value and the after the firmware upgrade it is very acceptable fan level.
Just purchased mine and fired it up. Plan is to use it for recording HD content - 100+ hours available on this unit, huge plus! While doing a test recording, the [now] famous fan kicked it and yes, it IS a presence in the room. My system is part of a home theater setup so un-necessary noise is to be avoided at all costs. Does it sound like a 747? No. It's about as loud as, and sounds like, a hair dryer being used in a closed bathroom down the hall, except that it's coming from that box in your room. I'll definitely have to check out the firmware upgrade to see if that helps, otherwise it'll have to go into a hush box of some kind or in another room.
Installation was no problem at all.
As someone who is digitizing my CD collection losslessly
(using EAC to extract from my commercial CDs, and FLAC
to compress), I was already pushing 1T with the two
500-gig WD My Books I already have. They deserve 5 stars;
if I give this product 4, it is because of the noise
from the fan: irritating when it is cooling, but since
I play my music loudly, and have become more used to
the background noise, I don't see it as too big an issue.
With a four-port USB 2.0 hub, I use one port for my external
soundcard, leaving three ports: the two 500 gig My Books,
and the 1T My Book Pro. That's 2T !
It of course has firewire, so eventually I may use that
and free up a USB port. Until then, for the cost -- 300
dollars less than the Maxtor 1T -- I feel very satisfied.
Now I just have to rearrange things so all the external
hard drives are in some quiet cooling cabinet. . . .
I like the feature of the drive turning off when not used
for a period of time; this keeps it cooler, so less fan noise,
and you don't have to remember to switch it off, either. Of
course, the main computer loses track of the drives when it
goes into hibernation, but quickly regains info when they
switch back on. They don't tell you, but you DO have to
format the drive for XP when it arrives, otherwise the My Book
1T is not recognized. The software provided lets you choose
whether to use RAID or not; with RAID, it is of course only
500 gig. Since I backup all my music on DVDs, I do not need
RAID, so I have all 1T available for music!
I was very excited after I ordered and received the My Book Pro II. I set it up to use RAID mirroring. Unfortunately, within two months, one of the hard drives inside failed on me. I was hoping that Western Digital drives had become more reliable in the years since I last used them and wrote them off, but I have been disappointed on that front. I am going back to Seagate, as their drives have performed much more reliably for me.
I read the negative reviews here, but due to good experiences in the past with WD including wishing to replace my current 250 Gig light up WD USB drive, I thought I'd take the plunge.
As expected I don't really see what the problem is! The styling and build quality is high. It has triple interfaces - so if you have FireWire 800 that is a big bonus!
The only negative I would give is one of the FireWire cables that should have been in the box was not in the box. I've saw other reviews where the cables where missing or mixed up so finding one cable missing did not please me.
I think the drive is great in terms of performance, styling and price.
My biggest concern when buying was all the bad reviews about noise. The drive most of the time is completely silent and if after a certain time it detects no usage, it switches itself off completely. If I copy a DVD to the drive from a slow DVD drive, then the fan does not kick in. If I copy a DVD to the drive from a fast DVD drive, the fan does kick in. And yes it is noisy but not as bad as people have made out. The only caveat I'd add is that I have a suspicion it has another fan stage which is very noisy. My father said when he used the drive to copy 80gig from another hard drive onto it, he could he it in the next room. Western Digital now offer a firmware upgrade (see their site) to try and reduce the noise by increasingly the temperature at which the fan comes in, and which also shuts it off quicker. Personally I'd rather have cool running drives and some noise, so I've opted not to do the firmware upgrade.
As regards the other reviewer saying his broke within 10 days, that can happen with any item. The Canon DSLR broke which I got from Amazon the first week! But that did not stop me getting another one! I've already had this drive on 4 plane journeys and even though it is not built for such travel it is fine.
On the technical front: Windows XP would not see the drive without installing the RAID manager software that comes with it and using it to format the drive (I went to NTFS). After which RAID manager could be uninstalled and then every PC it was plugged into could see it.
I'm very happy with the purchase but will knock off one star for the noise (which I'm not too bothered about) and for the missing firewire cable. I'd certainly not consider another manufacturer (I looked at the others).
Not sure what all the fuss is about - I can barely hear the fan while it is on in my unit. When connecting the drive, the reason your computer may have difficulty finding it is because the My Book drive needs to be formatted first. Jury is still out on how well I can edit HDV video but it only took about 15 minutes to copy a 22 gig file from my internal hard drive to this unit using USB 2.0.
Will keep you posted.
I just received my WD 1TB ProII. Works fine on WinXP under USB 2.0. Firewire 400 will not work. I have 3 other Maxtor OneTouch II and III's so am used to working with Firewire. Fan is incredibly noisy, read comments on WD Online Forum and you'll see others have same complaint. My Maxtor OneTouchIII's are virtually silent in comparison. Unable to update firmware for fan noise and I see on forums others are having same problem with drive detection. I wanted the WD for the 3yr warranty and self-replacement that Maxtor OneTouchIII's don't have but this WD product is not ready for mainstream. Unable to get through to phone support and been 3 days and no response on email. Going to return drive ASAP and get another Maxtor OneTouch 1TB. Warning, buy this model at your own risk. Good luck to those who are lucky enough to get a stable unit that works.
When I purchased this item I was really torn about which decision to make. On the one hand, Western Digital is know as one of the top hard drive manufacturers, and since I have had hard drive failures from 2 Lacie externals, 1 Maxtor external, and 1 Maxtor internal, and have had about 5 Western Digital hard drives last for years, I decided to go with the Western Digital drive. Another feature that led me to purchasing this product is the fact that it is made so that the owner can dismantle the case and easily replace a hard drive if it goes bad. On the other hand, the reviews for this product are really pretty poor.
Concerning installation: This product was a breeze to install, and changing it from RAID 0 to RAID 1 was simple using the provided software.
Concerning fan noice: I've seen reviews describe the noise as very loud like a leaf blower to as loud as a hair dryer. In my opinion it's as loud as a very small hair dryer. It was loud enough that I could not fall asleep when it was on, and one night it would not stop for some reason and I had to unplug it from the wall!
Concerning reliability: Well, again the individual hard drives appear to be very reliable and fast, which is pretty much standard for Western Digital. However, the firmware update failed rendering the product useless. Fortunately I was able to dismantle the product, remove the hard drives, and recover my data.
Summary: I would not purchase this drive until significant improvements are made to it in the areas of reliability and fan noise.
1) The fan is very noisy,
2) I had a *catastrophic* failure within few days of purchase,
3) you need a driver to use this drive,
4) I tried updating the firmware to 1.4 to deal with the noise - it failed every time I tried it.
If jet aircraft are southing to you, this is your drive. If a dental drill does not bother you will playing music, this is your drive.
This drive is insanely and obnoxiously loud.
I had 3 and returned them. The LaCie drives are a better value and are quiet.
Strieght to the point, yes the fan is loud (when it kicks on) than one commonly experiences but it may be tolerable, I suppose I have worked with computers for many years and have seen other similar product with cooling fans, such as my Epson printer, it has its own cooling fan that kicks on. But for some that operate in piece and quite and use this for real time file access all the time, it may be very annoying.
Another note like the review below is that he recieved the wrong power plug, well, guess what, I too recieved a 3 prong computer cable, but, more importantly I did have a matching 3 prong power adapter for my ProII (It is the single drive MyBook that has the 2 prong power adapter!). Also interesting to note is that I bought 2 WD MyBooks, and although the boxes did have all the cables, each box clearly had different grades of cables, wraped differently, mind you these were new seal from factory boxes. I strongly feel that this points out that the resources WD is using for its MyBook are abit unorganined to say the least.
RAID software failed to install on a Powerbook G4 laptop, error reported (OSX needs to be latest version?), additionally the install disk appears to missing some of the Mac install software! Next tried with my VAIO desktop, and eveything connected, but there is no visible drive in my computer. Discovered that ProII is formated in HPFS+ (Mac compatable only), so XP users MUST format over to NTFS and then the drive can be used by both Mac and PC.
WD does have a firmware update for the fan noise that modifies the behavior, another user reportedly flipped the fan inside the case that changed the pitch of the fan noise. Other than that anyone that have a modern PC or Mac tower has heard the cooling fans kick in, well that is the gist of the sound you can expect, although perhaps a differnt pitch becuase of the smaller diameter of the fan in the ProII.
Final thought, the fan is not that bad, I would rather have a well built data solution that did have cooling, this is your precious data your talking about. As for the difficulty installing, that is left to be desired.
UPDATE
Hmmm, dive does spin up for no reason as other have mentioned, possibly due to file table maintenance or something like that... perhaps XP restore logging in the background causeing this, cooling fan does kick on because of this, typically only lasts for 5 minutes, but as I type it is carrying on for quite awhile.
Caution, I thought I could tolerate the noise but with the unit auto spinning up for no reason and then having the fan come on, it does get annoying.
The issue is one that I have had with two of the three systems I have tried it on; there is a compatibility issue between the USB system and the raid controller; the Pro II series have two drives, and an internal raid controller that determines how the storage is laid out, and how the disk devices are presented.
While most systems can identify and use USB hard drives without a special driver, the PRO II requires the raid controller be working before the standard disk drivers can see the USB devices for the internal drives. Once those devices can be seen, the normal driver for disk i/o is used.
I've spent two weeks now with WD support on the issue, and they are not even going to look at it. Its their position that since the device works with some USB controllers and not others, that its up to the USB controller manufacturer to address the issue.
Of course, the USB manufacturer believes that since the USB controller works fine with all sorts of other devices, including other Western Digital disks, the problem is with the Western Digital Driver.
I'd consider looking into a single-drive solution. The segate 750gb external solution has a single drive, and is about 2/3rd the cost. It also has a 5 year, rather than a 1 year, warranty. WD also has single drive external solutions that do not have the raid controller compatibility issue.
I have never written a review for any product in my life. But I felt that it is important for this one. The fan is unbelievable. It is like having a small very frustrated vacuum cleaner on all the time. I was so amped to expand my storage in a single unit. Moses Jesus Mohammed Buddha and Chango this is loud. I am trying to work with it next to me I have music on fairly loud and it makes no difference. Actually it makes it worse. It is not a serene hum, or a neutral sound in any way. It is a very imposing and damaging machine. It is like a frightening science project in an insane asylum. More like an airplane or an industrial processor than something that one reads and writes next to. It is clear that this machine will create problems for me. I can hear it from outside my house.
Ok - I have been around in the graphics biz for over 2 decades and I would have to say that WD has 'jumped the shark' ('jumped the couch' nowadays). First off - I wanted to try this out for my mac laptop as a photo library for Aperture, being that it could run in raid 1 i decided to buy this from provantage. I received my product on Nov 2nd. I opened the box and get this, sealed in plastic, sealed in the new box was the WRONG power cable - instead of the little 2 female connector needed to plug into the power supply, the power cord was a standard PC power cable that needless to say would not fit.... To make a long long long story short - It took me till today (Nov 11th!!) to get the right power cords from WD (after jumping through god knows how many hoops). I plugged it in and surprise surprise... DOA! unbelievable! I contacted provantage and am currently awaiting my RMA - which I am NOT returning for a product replacement but rather for my money back...Who knows how long it might take to get one that A) has the right components in the box from the manufacturer and B) would work once it did.... what a joke. I can't say weather the other reviews of the fan being super loud - 11 days with the product and I have not been able to get it to work...thus I will never find out. I advise anyone thinking of getting this device NOT to do it. I have decided to get a real solution, a Fibernetix 605 from [...] ... check it out.
Great idea. Pretty package. Lousy design.
The first time the internal fan came on I laughed at how loud it was.
The second time the fan came on.. I didn't laugh.
It is like having a hair dryer on your dekstop.
Do not buy until WD works out this issuse.
I called them today and the best advice they could give was
"I guess you ought to keep the drive cool" !
Come on guys..
My LaCie 1 TB USB drive is whisper quiet. All the time.
I totally have to agree with the earlier reviewer who mentioned the noise level on this thing. The box, the site, the descriptions all take great pains to describe this as a whisper-quiet, fanless system. They are all wrong. The thing is like having a 747 start up in your office. it's deafeningly loud. It's great that you can get 1TB of storage to sit on your desktop, but at the expense of your peace and quiet? i dunno... it's becoming a hard trade-off. There doesn't appear to be any way around it either. Once the fan starts you're typically in for at least 20 minutes of full-blast, wind-tunnel action. If you can tolerate the noise, it's a near ideal storage solution.