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Western Digital WDG1U7500N My Book Essential Edition 750 GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive | List Price: $279.99
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Brand: Western Digital
Binding: Electronics
Warranty: 1 year warranty
Features: - Easy to set up, easy to use -- This drive is all about simplicity. Plug it into your computer's USB 2.0 port and start saving.
- Intelligent drive management features -- The My Book drive turns itself on and off with your computer.
- Smart design -- The elegant case, iconic of a book, takes up less space on your desk, stacks horizontally, and allows two or more drives to stand neatly together like volumes on a shelf.
- High quality hard drive -- Inside the case is an exceptionally fast, ultra quiet, cool-running hard drive from Western Digital.
- Free Google software -- Search your drive, manage your photos, and simplify Web searches with included Google software. Note: Google software is compatible with Windows 2000 and XP only.
did not work on imac [Posted on 2008-03-14]
could not get this drive to work on my imac (leopard 10.5.2). the person i had trying to install it had considerable experience with the mac operating system but still could not get it to operate. I would not recommend this for the "time machine" backup.
Reliable & Efficient [Posted on 2008-04-24]
This is my 4th western digital external hard drive, and 3rd in the mybook series. My oldest is 3 years. The drives are reliable, accessing files is quick (however it will go to sleep if not used for a while, but even then will only take 5-10 seconds to "wake up"), and the price keeps coming down. Recommended.
Nervous about reliability [Posted on 2008-04-26]
Purchased this to provide a backup of my digitized video files. Connecting to my G4 PowerMac I tried to format the drive using Disk Utility. The first couple of times failed, getting an "input/output" error. But I able to eventually format the drive -- chalking it up to user error.
I transferred about 100GB of video without any problems on Day 1.
My second attempt to transfer more files resulted in the drive locking up (the Copy indicator on the Mac stalled with no indication of bits being transferred.) I couldn't cancel the copy via the dialog, did a Force Quit (to no avail) and was forced to do a hard shut down (Powered off the Mac.)
When I powered everything back on, the drive was no longer mountable. I launched Disk Utility again and it recognized the drive as a Western Digital 2TB drive with no USB serial number!
From this point forward, I was unable to reformat, partition, or otherwise get the drive to work. Even tried to connect it to my XP laptop.
So back to WD it goes. Fortunately, I did not erase the previously copied 100GB, so no data loss. But this experience does make me a little nervous about trusting the drive as an archiving or sole copy repository.
The old adage is true - if it doesn't exist in two separate locations, it may as well not exist.
Makes noise and went bad after a year [Posted on 2008-05-01]
I had a WD and mine was pretty noisy at times. The drive went bad after a year. About four months after the manufacturer warranty. I had to pay 1,500 to retrieve my data. Found out it was a bad controller. Anyway I am now using LaCie Drives. I realize that sometimes there are bad batches of drives. But at least with LaCie they give you a 3 YEAR WARRANTY on their drives.
Failed After One Year [Posted on 2008-05-21]
I'm one of those people who reads reviews were hardware fails, and thinks, "Well, they just weren't handling the hardware correctly."
I'm super-careful with my hardware, so I thought I'd have no problem with this drive.
When the drive failed, I wasn't even in the country. I was away from home for two months, accessing the computer this drive was connected to via Remote Desktop. One day I tried to access files on the drive, only to discover the the drive seemed to be empty.
A few weeks later, on returning home and reconnecting the drive, everything seemed to be working fine, but that was the beginning of the end. The drive would just "drop connection" from my XP machine, resulting in a "Delayed Write Error" message.
I switched it to my Windows Vista machine, and it worked a bit better, but still would drop the connection after a few minutes of use. Eventually it began to take down Windows Explorer with it, requiring a reboot of the machine.
Tonight I spent a few hours, slowly moving my most important data from the drive. It stalled on a number of files, freezing the machine and corrupting the files that were unfortunate enough to be in the process of transfering when the drive stalled.
I lost some data, but with patience I was able to move most of my data to other drives on my network.
I'm still waiting to hear back from WD support. I'm pretty sure my warranty is over, since I think I bought this drive just over a year ago.
I guess it is just a hunk of garbage now, since I don't have a spare tower machine to move the hard disk itself into (there are sites online that explain how to remove the drive from its case and install it as an internal drive).
I'm going to avoid Western Digital for a while. My LaCie drive (two years old) is still running with no issues.
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