Customer Reviews

Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition 2TB USB 2.0 (WDH2U20000N)

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

I've owned this drive for about five months at this writing, and use it to store all my video and music files (both mp3 and wav). And I still have 400GB of free space!

Its USB 2.0 interface is fast enough for video playback in a RAID 0 configuration (since it's actually two 1TB drives it can also be set RAID 1 to automatically back up everything you put on it).

It's a fairly small and very attractive package that doesn't get overly warm; if it has cooling fans inside I haven't heard them running yet. I much prefer its keyhole-shaped fluorescent-looking indicator light to the blinking bull's eye I've seen on older MyBook drives. Its up-and-down motion is actually kind of soothing.

Opening the box to replace a drive, if necessary, doesn't look too difficult if you're so inclined. It's quiet but not totally silent -- there's a soft clattering sound when it's working but I don't find it annoying and it's totally masked by movie audio or music.

One bit of advice, do NOT assume that Microsoft Vista's automatic "Defrag Lite" will do a good job on a drive this huge. I started to experience playback problems with recorded video and discovered that the drive was severely fragmented, even with Vista set to defrag it once a week. There's no easy way to analyze the drive for fragmentation with Vista defrag's dumbed-down user interface. And it would be great if WD included a defrag utility in its Drive Manager or Diagnostics Tool -- it doesn't. But there's freeware out there (Auslogics or JKDefrag) that will do a thorough job and, even better, actually show you what it's doing. So defrag this drive thoroughly and often, especially if you copy, move, delete and convert a lot of large video files.

I purchased this drive with the intent to backup all my family videos, photos and other files. Currently my file server actually has a RAID 1 setup but I thought redundancy can never be too much.
Well - The My Book Mirror Edition was not the answer. At the end of all of this I purchased two of these units, having each one successively fail on me.
I probably only ended up loading 300+ gigs on the drives. They would work well for 2-3 days and then when transferring a large file (typically video) all hell would break loose with the WD raid manager saying I had issues (red icon). After each incident the external drive would not be recognisable by my PC (running XP). The drives would also not work on another of my PCs. I would get dialogs of Unknown USB something and couldn't get the drives to mount.
In both instances I had to take out the physical hard drives to remove my personal data and the actual drives ran without issue. Therefore I can only surmise that the WD system for the RAID setup or the manager is not ready for prime time.
Given my personal experience I would highly recommend people to not consider purchasing this ext. drive if they want peace of mind.

We've got about five of the 2TB Western Digital MyBooks for our IT department. We've had them a couple years, approximately. We've learned it's a bad idea to try to use them for anything more demanding than, as advertised, storing photos. For instance, we've learned it's a bad idea to use these in association with backup-to-disk applications. No Go. These USB devices seem only suited for static data that doesn't need to be referenced often. They're far too slow, and they are far too ready to drop their connection to the PC to which they are attached. We've tried them on a variety of PCs and servers. Even today, for example, I'm just trying to copy data to them from across the network -- the device cannot maintain a connection long enough to copy an 800MB folder to it.

We have not tried the firewire connection to see if that works any better.

I recently upgraded my laptop to a Dell XPS M1530 - running Vista64. I bought a 500gb WD Passport which would work perfectly on my 32bit XP and 32bit Vista boxes, but not my new Dell. So I went to get this drive. I figured the Raid-1 option would end up being safer anyway.

Ho boy! Nope. Freeze after freeze. Took me quite a while to find on WD's site (it's in the Downloads, not FAQ's, not KnowledgeBase) that no 64 bit os is supported. In this day of 4gb+ boxes and the needed 64bit OS's, that's unacceptable.

Too bad. I have 3 others of this model hooked to my network (via NSLU2) and it's a great drive setup. As long as you never connect it to a 64bit box!

I bought this product for it's simplicity and the mirror drive. The problem I have is it fails at providing the basics of what one would buy this product in the first place. The My Book I received is clearly defective but for obvious reasons. I was OK with the cheap plastic enclosure since I just plan to have it sit on the desk in a cool well ventilated spot. I like that it would do some power savings since I was not going to be using it all the time. I wanted a mirrored drive since drives fail and even if I can rebuild the data I rather spend the extra now so I would not have to. I am sending my drive back it is defective but I learned something in the process that I can share.
First the product is about the enclosure. Mirror drives Raid 1. I did not have anything fancy planned for this drive. All I needed was a USB connection and to format it for my MAC. No problem. The problem I encountered was the drive kept dismountnig. It would drop on writes and reads. There is no mention of this on WD's knowledge base or help. I checked the forums and there are many accounts of people having the same problem. Some say remove the software, update software, update bios, others say that does not help. I read it happening to both windows and mac users. The claim is the power saving feature causes the drive to go to sleep and unmount. I tried the power button on the back to wake it up but it did not do anything. I pull the plug and re power the device. drive came back. In playing with it I experienced a wide variety of behaviors.
-press button and I have no idea what the button is for.
-Ah when working properly the button wakes it up.
-It does not matter if the drive is in use it will go to sleep.
-setting everything in the OS not to sleep makes no difference.
-The power light flickers when I plug it in and then no light
-update bios not change, new drive manager software no change
-No software still dismounts
Basically it is this the the controller that has the power conector and the USB is incredibly cheap. It seems prone to having problems and WD is not being straight up about this. Out of all the parts of the enclose to be sturdy and reliable it is this component. It would be a better choice to buy two separate drives then this one. For me the main point was to have a nice neat package with one power cord and one box with mirrored drives. This is defeated by making the one critical part a liability above the drives failing. I only wish they took the time and money for the fancy flashing light and put it into making the power and USB component better quality.

I have always been a fan of WD internal drives. Never once had one fail. I guess their external drives are not as good. I bought this unit a couple months ago and saw the drive failure problems noted in the review section but ignored them because I figured its a mirrored system right? NO. not quite. Apparently both drives were corrupted by the controller and I lost all my data. What a sham. Now neither of the drives will format at all. Ive taken them out independently and hooked them strait into a desktop. nothing...... All I get are formatting errors. Do not trust this drive with any important data..

Costco is selling these for $150.00 and it may be because 64 bit is not supported.

When I go to the WD web site and go to
Downloads My Book Mirror Edition
then to Available software for this product
then to My Book Mirror Edition Firmware Update - PC
then I read the following; Supported Operating Systems, Windows 2000, XP (32-bit), or Vista (32-bit)

I do not see that 64 bit is supported????

I've only had the product just 1 month so it's a little premature to review now, however I will say that so far it has been easy to put into place and seems to be working fine. I tried to defragment using regular Windows Defragmenter but it would not work. I then asked for suggestions/recomendations on what third party defragmenter has been tested to work on this device and was informed that they could not recommend any due to potential liabilites. If this is the case I think they should have tested this using Windows defrag and ensured that it would work. Other than that I am happy with it but would very much like to defrag it.

I have 4 of these drives that were working happily with Vista-64 (I saw another user that stated that these drives were not supported for 64-bit but I never had a compatibility problem). I changed my OS to Windows 7 64-bit and now I can only connect 1 drive at a time (more than 1 causes the system to freeze up when writing data to/from the disk). WD is ignoring the issue as is MSFT so I would be very careful and do your research before selecting this drive with Windows 7!

Installation software doesn't allow me (maybe it will allow you) to change the RAID setting so that you can use it save up to 2 TB as it's advertised. RAID is the name for the way the drive is written to, with "RAID 0" setting writing 2TB once over 2TB and "RAID 1" setting writing 1TB twice over 2 TB to backup what you write. Installation software says you can change RAID settings default from 1 to 0, but when you click on that option to launch it, the installation ceases. I'm using Vista 64 bit system. Yes, I've looked at the manual and on-line help, and tried WD's customer service--that amounted to "don't plug into power strip and don't use USB hub to connect to PC", with no help for my issue which is that the installation software isn't installing. I can write stuff to the drive so the drive is "there" but I'm not confident the stuff I write is backed up on the default Raid 1 since I have no way of seeing the backup or how much space of it is used. Also, Beach Camera's 15 day return policy is too strict, especially if you take time to try to first work out a problem with the manufacturer that isn't too quick on the assistance. If you like a gamble, this product might be fun for you, but that's not why I want an external backup HD.

Update on my installation problem. Western Digital help desk (yes, they are responding), says "But the issue here may be that you are using Vista 64 bit." and their on-line site says Vista 64-bit isn't supported for this drive. So if you have Vista 64-bit and are thinking of buying this drive---well, the answer is obvious. Product specs shown when I made the purchase are: "Windows® 2000/XP/Vista" but as I now know, that's not fully correct. Seller (Beach Camera) has 15 day return policy--not enough time to figure out installation issues dealing with the manufacturer, but seller came through after one month by offering to take it back.

Update--not only did Beach Camera agree to take it back, they did apply the refund--give them a big plus for helping out! Still, if you have Vista 64-bit, this device ain't gonna work per my experience and per the manufacturer's specs on their web site, which unfortunately doesn't show up when you look at the product info to see if you want to buy it.