Customer Reviews

Western Digital Elements 640 GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a basic external USB-only drive. It's passively cooled, and has rubber "ends" that act as non-skid feet and keep the bottom off the desk for a little extra airflow. There are no external switches, and the whole unit is pretty sleek. The unit uses a specialty cable from an external "brick"-style power-converter.

The drive spins down into power-save pretty quickly at idle, but if you use your external disk heavily in a warm room, the lack of a fan may be a problem. My unit was rather warm to the touch in a cool room after about 2 hours of steady use. It's nice and quiet, though!

My only real complaint is the lack of a front-mounted LED. The only activity/power indicator (both functions performed by one LED) is on the back of the unit next to the power connector.

Western Digital had a reputation as a budget manufacturer of low-quality products back at the start of the decade. I feel they've returned to innovative products and high quality in recent years, although the 1-year warranty on this item still made me hesitate.

I brought the WD Element a week ago,the drive was formatted to PC (MS-DOS FAT) and I wanted to reformat it to Mac Extended (journaled). After a full day without success (I'm a pretty good tech person ), I finally found the below instruction and got it to work. I wish WD give instructions for us Mac users.
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I had the same problem with the Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External Drive that I bought. It kept failing when I tried to reformat it for my Mac as Mac Extended (journaled). I was ready to return the drive because it was so frustrating!

I called WD customer support and they walked me through it over the phone:

This is what worked perfectly:

Use the Apple Disk utility software that comes with your Mac.

PARTITION your WD Hard drive as 1 Partition and while you are in that same window, SELECT OPTIONS.

THIS IS THE KEY: There are 3 radio buttons in the popup window for formatting options. The drive was preset as the bottom button PC formatting and you have to chose the middle button which is for Mac.

Click apply and finish formatting your drive. Works perfectly.

One other thing, it is a good idea not to have any applications running when you format the drive.

I purchased this hard drive from Amazon for a whopping $79.99 which is the best price I have found. For 640GB of storage you CAN NOT beat this price! I use this hard drive for back up of my ITunes library, photos, and digital home videos. The hard dive is powered by an a/c cord and plugs directly into your computer with a USB cord. The drive is small so it takes up minimal space and runs very quietly when in use.

The ONLY draw back of this drive is the transfer time of files due to the USB (I transferred approx. 16,000 songs in 1 1/2hrs). BUT...the price tag more than makes up for that small issue.

I highly recommend this hard drive to anyone!

This hard drive works very well for backing up my home files. It is quiet, does not overheat or get super hot to the touch when left on, and works pretty fast. I am very happy with it and had no problem backing up the complete contents of my windows laptop in less than a half an hour.

Bought one of these external drives in November 2008, infrequently used it since then, and now it's July 2009 and the drive in not working. Plug the power connector into the rear of the drive, the little blue light comes on, then it immediately goes off with the computer unable to access the drive. This makes the second Western Digital drive in the last three years that has died on me, the other was a 500 gig internal drive, and I'm getting tired of the poor reliability.

The price and delivery were excellent. The hard drive installation was very easy, and it works great. Very satisfied.

Haven't really got into using this drive yet. It is a good old brand name and was purchased for the size and price. I thought it was unbeatable.