Reviews for WD My Book Essential Edition External 1TB 3.5" Hard Drive

By member: JCONDE - Mar 4, 2008

Nice unit but a little slow

Strengths: sleek and black

Weakness: slow on the uptake

I have had this unit for a couple of weeks now and it does its job. I purchase it to replace a maxtor unit that died on me. Made the mistake of not having a backup and paid the consequences. I will not do that again and will purchase a second unit soon. My only issue is that it is a little slow when it comes to input/output. What do you want for $230?

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Western digital MyBook 1TB External Hard Drive

Strengths: Good looking, and working very well with reasonable price.

Weakness: -

This drive is elegant and light weight than I imagine. It works very well and quiet. I’m not good at computer stuff, but I need a big drive to store many things. When I got it, I could use it easily.So, I'd like recommend this drive to other people. It's been all my memories!!

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Nice 1TB Hard Drive

Strengths: Elegantly designed; One single 1TB drive instead of two 500GB; Power Efficient

Weakness: Show a capacity of 930GB instead of 1TB

This is a very elegantly designed USB 2.0 external hard drive from Western Digital. Although it is a little pricy, i got it at a discount during the Thanksgiving sales and i could tell you it is well worth the extra money.

The drive enclosure is a glossy black finish with a soft blue LED lights in front. If you intend to keep this drive in the living room next to your PC, the soft blue LED will definitely NOT distract you when you watch movie.

Look through the ventilation holes from behind the enclosure, you can see that it is a single 1TB drive instead of two 500GB, which is nice. A lot of cheaper 1TB alternatives out there are actually using two 500GB instead.

To use the drive, it is as simple as plugging it in to the USB port of the computer and it is instantly recognized. The drive is preformatted as FAT32 of a capacity of 930GB (you will never see it as exactly 1TB). I just use Windows Explorer to format it to NTFS using Quick Format, and it takes only a few seconds.

The drive is extremely quiet and i could not hear a thing when i place it next to my PC/TV. The drive has a small external power adapter, but it does not need a power switch because the drive will automatically turn on/off when your PC turns on/off/sleep. Very neat energy efficient design.

Overall, Western Digital is a great HDD manufacturer and it has designed a very good product that exceed my expectation.

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Great value

Strengths: Large capacity and fast

Weakness: None

The internal drive is the 1TB WD Cavier CP. Very fast and efficient. I took the drive out and used it as a internal drive for my pc, runs very fast and quiet.

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WD 1TB MyBook Essential

Strengths: Very quiet, power conserving.

Weakness: Backup software is trial.

As other reviewers have noted, the drive is formatted FAT32 and is painfully slow when you first plug it in and it autostarts the process for loading its software. If you want to keep the software, which is a trial -- $30 for the full product, *don't* reformat the drive, but rather _convert_ it (Win XP/Vista). From an administrator cmd window (Start, type cmd and right-click cmd.exe) issue the command "convert D: /fs:ntfs" where 'D' is the drive letter assigned by your system. The conversion only takes about 5 minutes since the drive is essentially empty. With NTFS the drive is pretty fast although I haven't actually timed it.

But I'll say it again, the backup software from Mateo is a 30-day trial -- absurd!

The 1-yr warranty may be a concern but right now this is probably the market choice.

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Western digital MyBook 1TB External Hard Drive

Strengths: Elegant looking; 1TB (a lot of space!); Compact in size; USB 2.0 (fast!)

Weakness: None so far

I bought this external hard drive this thanksgiving and love it very much. I had two 250GB MyBook external hard drives before and this one is way better look than the old version MyBooks. It has 1TB space and can take tons of data with it. Its size is quite compact, smaller than the 1st version of MyBook. Overall, I love this hard drive and would recommend it to other people.

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Best Storage Device So Far I have

Strengths: ITB, silent, easy to work, no software installation required

Weakness: No On/Off switch, no stand

I am really impressed by it. 1TB is a lot of space and I was expecting it be a little bulky and noisy. But on the contrary, it is small, quiet and very easy to use. Although, it comes with some pre-loaded software, I didn’t need to install them or format the drive to access it and was able to use it right away.

It would nice if it came with an ON/OFF switch and stand/bag, but no biggy.

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Western digital MyBook 1TB External Hard Drive

Strengths: 1. Hibernate mode when computer is in sleep mode 2. Runs extremely cool 3. Extremely quite 4. Nice blue light 5. Energy efficient

Weakness: 1. No on/off switch 2. Mini-USB and not standard USB cable 3. Reformatting to NTFS ships with FAT32 for compatability 4. Short warranty period of 1 year but entered serial at WD site and says 3 yr

Use Windows to format it to NTFS using Quick Format (5 seconds), or do a Full Format and it takes approximately 12 hours -- support for files over 4GB in size & better security with NTFS.

The drive is extremely cool and quiet. NTFS runs faster and you can get rid of all that trial software that is pre-loaded. I have always bought the Sxxxxxx brand but am impressed with this drive compared to my other 6 Sxxxxx drives which get so hot and have long warranties but have been crashing lately. Western Digital must have the best quality control. I do wonder how hard it is to get inside if I ever need to retrieve the data from a dead drive ... the Sxxxxxx USBs that I have are very difficult to get into without the video from our most popular site, Yxxxxxx. Found a good one with photos for this case with a search.

Hope I continue to LOVE this Drive!

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Hard Drive Review

Strengths: Large size, single drive, easy to use

Weakness: Short Warranty Period

A single external terabyte drive that is easy to use, just have to plug in the cables and ready to use outside of the box. It has a nice and simple design that is stackable with other My Book drives. The drive powers off and on by itself whenever it is accessed. This terabyte drive is different from their previous models where this is an actual terabyte instead of the RAID design of two 500 GB drives in their previous models. Overall a good drive except for the short warranty period.

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WD 1TB External HD

Strengths: Huge capacity, fast with 16MB Cache and 7200RPM

Weakness: no

The wester Digital My book essential edition 2 External 1TB Hard Drive is rock! It is very easy to setup, just plug in the PC will recognize it automatically. The speed is high. Noise is low. No weakness till now.

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Western digital MyBook 1TB External Hard Drive

Strengths: Fast speed, sleek, reliable, small

Weakness: I would say that it's slightly noisy but that should be expected from having 1TB in such a small compartment.

I bought this end of May and instantly slammed it full of data, all of which it readily accepted. It has only a small blue light in the front which is nice both for aesthetic purposes and makes it less distracting. There is no on/off switch on the device itself but unless it's plugged into a computer that's turned on it goes into a hibernate mode which is very nice. As said above it is a little noisier than my other HD but nothing I wouldn't have expected from 1TB of info being stored in such a small box. I have had zero problems with it and am very pleased with my purchase.

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WD My Book Essential Edition External 1TB

Strengths: Compact. Attractive design. Excellent capacity/price. Single drive.

Weakness: Why ship a 1 TB drive formatted as FAT32 and not NTFS.

Living in the digital world with high resolution cameras and videos, 1 TB storage is becoming the norm and WD have produced a reasonably priced and compact unit. This is the basic unit and I could see no advantage paying significantly more for a unit with a firewire connector as well. Very happy with my purchase, just a little confused why WD would ship it configured for FAT32 with all the limitations FAT32 has regarding file size.

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I now have 6 of these and they all work flawlessly

Strengths: Work great. Never had an issue

Weakness: None

I have now purchased 6 of these drives and I have not had any problems. I am using them for video storage and they work great. I have owned quite a few Western Digital external hard drives and I have been very impressed.

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WD My Book Essential Edition External 1TB Hard Drive

Strengths: One single 1TB drive; Compact in size; Plug & Play.

Weakness: None

Reasonably priced nice external hard drive with lots of storage space. Reformatting to NTFS is fast from FAT32 standard the drive ships with (I use PC).

Used it at a stretch for over 32 hours---transferred 700GB for another external & some back up---amazingly, drive does not run too hot. The plastic vents on top seems to do a good job of air circulation & ventilation.

Speed of transfers seemed pretty much ok to me--though there are newer & costlier interfaces out there.

The only minor gripe--uses a different type of USB connector cable, especially the part where it connects on to the External--guess it is the mini-USB type; so have to make sure to have it. Personally, I preferred the earlier USB cables---the ones you could plug into the printers or the External hard Drives.

Highly recommended as a reasonably priced storage solution.

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Does not support Mac formatting

Strengths: Big and cheap

Weakness: Mac Unfriendly

While one review says you can format for the Mac, when I run Disk Utility it only lets me erase it with MS-DOS (fat). The Western Digital utility says it should, but it doesn't. The Mac sees it and it seems to work, but I'm not sure how it will work with apps like Time Machine. This is with 10.5.2 of the Mac OS.

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WD Mybook

Strengths: It worked for 6 months.

Weakness: It trashed a backup file and would not restore.

It would not restore a file backed up to it and never showed it had any errors until it was too late. No management capabilities, doesn't self check itself and its files. Consumer style product, not designed for using it every day. Selling stuff like this is why compusa went under with so many dissatisfied customers.

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DO NOT WASTER YOUR MONEY ON WESTERN DIGITAL

Strengths: none that I found. Only used it once though.

Weakness: Doesn't work when it is needed. Took a dump right after the warranty period.

I was using this to back up computer files. Only used it once. Went to retrieve info after warranty already expired. I think they must have the shortest warranty period! Must be because that is when they are known to fail. Seems there are a lot of people out there with this problem. WD has bad external drives and doesn't care. Researched and found a better external drive. No bad reviews and is actually less expensive. Easy to use and much more reliable than WD. Thanks for nothing Western Digital. You won't be getting any of my money again.

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