WD My Book Essential Edition External 500GB 3.5" Hard Drive

Just Stopped Working

Strengths: Worked for 1 month

Weakness: Terrible engineering, very easy to brick it and lose all of your data.

I had this hard drive for more than a month now, and it worked just fine. I made a copy of my brother's music database and it worked just fine for a long time. I came home today and plugged it in, and it didn't work. The hard drive didn't even spin. The green circle in front flashes weakly for a little bit, and that's all. Western Digital could care less, too.

Almost Guaranteed to Fail

Strengths: Easy to Connect, small footprint, inexpensive.

Weakness: You will lose all of your data when the drive fails.

I've had two of these, both an older model and the newer Firewire 800 model. They both failed in less than 6 months. Bottom line, don't consider buying one if you need to store important information. You'll find out the hard way that they're great devices for holding the office door open on a windy day, and not much more. Seriously, in fairness the competing products all have the same issues,...

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No problems

Strengths: Large capacity, portability.

Weakness: Price can be an issue, but storage is coming down in cost big time. I think that I paid about $149 after rebate, so very good at that price. A longer warranty would be nice.

I wanted to use this for a while before I posted a review. I am using this drive to store movies. The 500GB size and USB 2.0 interface have made it an excellent choice for this purpose. For my needs and at the price for which I made the purchase, I am very pleased with this drive. The lack of firewire hasn't been a problem, since all of my computers don't have a firewire connection anyway. Only...

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Excellent Value

Strengths: Quite small, aesthetically pleasing, quiet, high capacity, inexpensive

Weakness: Only one year warranty, not pre-formatted to NTFS, not 500GB but 465GB (not really a weakness, but you should keep this in mind)

I recently purchased this from a popular online computer retailer. When I first plugged it into my USB2.0 PCI card, all of my USB peripherals got disconnected. After a reboot, everything seemed fine. I do not know if this product was the culprit though. Setup was extremely easy--plug and play. The only things I needed to do were change it to NTFS instead of FAT32 and set it up in WinXP for...

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Two Died - !!!

Strengths: Well, when they (2) worked, were okay. Large inexpensive...

Weakness: STOPPED working in less than three months. This in a very controlled environment with careful care. ALL data gone! Will not buy again.

A 1/3 or 1/4 failure rate is Unacceptable! And to lose data on top of Just NOT working? Wow... WD, where did you subcontract this junk to? Cannot recommend, period.

MY Book

Strengths: 500gb space, Great looking design, good perfromance, air ventilated through holes, Nice turning on and off feature

Weakness: Plastic design, no way to open enlousure, one year warranty pretty much standard among external hard drives

My book is a great addition to any desk. This external hard drive looks increarible good on the desk. The 500gb hard drive is nothing more than western digital sata 2 16mb buffer cabier hard drive. Western digital took their newest hard drive model and just added enclosure. Funny because a hard drive with enclosure and without cost about the same. This external hard drive has great feature stand...

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This drive died on me in 10 days.

Strengths: Its cheap, attractive, and has plenty of space.

Weakness: It gave up the ghost for no apparent reason and I lost over 400 gigs of data in an instant. Do bumps, shakes, or drops. Not a very happy camper.

I've owned 4 previous external drives and I decided to go with western digital because of the rave reviews. Now I have the worst data loss of my life. I'm going back to LaCie.

WD My Book Essential Edition External 500GB Hard...

Strengths: $/GB, power management, front mounted power switch

Weakness: Still looking for one

Bought this on a great sale at BestBuy for $200 and have been kicking myself for not buying two. May buy a second at this week's sale price of $230. I'm transferring old Sony 8mm and Digital 8mm video to hard disk for editing and back-up and chewing up GB like never before. Didn't need any backup software, just massive quantities of reliable basic storage. The drive is remarkably quiet in...

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My Book Essential 500GB

Strengths: Small, simple, reasonably priced

Weakness: No firewire interface

It's hard to ding the unit because it has no firewire interface since they make a premium model that does have it. However, the premium model was enough extra $ at the time as to not be worth it. The unit is basically just a plug-n-play external drive with very little software on it. The premium model comes with backup software, but again, the backup software that's bundled with these external...

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Awful drive -- died (along with my data) after 1...

Strengths: Looks nice.

Weakness: Horrible product with high failure rate.

If you don't believe the failure rate, read the comments on the following site: www.tomrafteryit.net/w... I transferred all my photos and music from an 80 gig drive (that was working just fine) to this one .. everything was working great for about a month and then all of a sudden .. drive is no longer readable. WD tells me to use a data restoration company (I was quoted $500 to $1750 to get my...

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