Customer Reviews

Western Digital My Book Essential 750 GB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive

5 star:		(179)
4 star:		(83)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(21)
1 star:		(79)

 

 

[Update: 3/2009: It's been more than a year since I wrote this lengthy review and I wanted to return and let people know how these drives are performing.

I have a total of ten of these drives - four the newer series referenced here, six the slightly older model that looks a bit different but is otherwise interchangeable. I am happy to report than only one drive suffered some intermittent failures in read/writing since purchase. No data was ever lost, but the problem was becoming annoying and I replaced it using their warranty service. I've had no drive failures otherwise and no data integrity problems. I find it important not to block the ventilation holes and am always on the lookout for any early signs of drive failure, such as ticking noises, grinding, or excessive drive whine, and have noted nothing thus far.

Overall, I am fully satisfied with this drive series and believe WD is definitely proven competent in the external drive marketplace.]

Western Digital has released v2.0 of the My Book Essential external hard drive series, redesigned for late 2007.

The Essential series is the value line from Western Digital's external hard drive product line. Featuring a USB-only connection, the drive is targeted to price-conscious users who need lots of extra storage space, but don't need multiple connectivity options (USB, eSATA, Firewire).

Slightly reduced in thickness from its predecessor, v2.0 is about the size of an epic paperback novel only a few inches deeper. It weighs in around two pounds.

Gone is the green lighted circle which used to represent the power switch on older v1.0 drives - v2.0 uses a blue-lighted vertical drive activity indicator which alternates on and off when the drive is being accessed.

But also gone is the power switch itself. The latest generation of external drives from a variety of manufacturers including Western Digital and Seagate are now omitting them as a cost-saving measure. The My Book powers up upon plugging in the power and/or the USB connector. The drive is configured to power down after 10 minutes of inactivity or sensing the computer has been turned off.

Another substantial change is also becoming common with external drive models - doing away with the standard USB cable and replacing it with a USB-mini. The included cable, around three feet in length, may be too short for some applications, and be prepared to have some longer USB mini connector cables on hand if you want to extend the reach. Seagate has gone the same way.

Setting the drive up takes well under five minutes, from removing the shrink wrap on the box to actually seeing the drive on your desktop. The box comes with a very brief manual, a power cord (with a horizontally aligned transformer which may or may not be a good thing depending on where you plug it in), a USB cable, and the unit itself, wrapped in a protective plastic sheet.

The drive is pre-formatted using the FAT system, which creates a single partition of 465 gigabytes. The FAT file system assures the drive will function on multiple platforms. The drive will prompt you to install some minor diagnostic software and some Google tools you likely already have considered - Google Toolbar, Picasa, and Google Desktop (which indexes your hard drive and uses the Google search engine to help you find files.) For the latter, consider Copernic Desktop Search 2, which is free and offers superior search performance and better tools.

Most Windows and XP users will want to reformat the drive to the NTFS file system, which will support those 4+ gigabyte files FAT will not. You can easily reformat the drive under XP by clicking your way through Control Panel ("->" means you should click on this option) -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management. It takes at least an hour to complete the reformat, and be aware the tools included on the drive will be erased so consider backing them up somewhere else if you care about them.

V2.0's redesign features a very shiny, smooth surfaced external case. I fear it will readily show fingerprints and scratches, so be extra careful when handling it.

As with the earlier model, no internal fan is apparent and heat dissipation is absolutely critical to the longevity of any hard drive. Some manufacturers have skimped on this, such as Seagate with their FreeAgent series which has had a high failure rate, but v1.0 Western Digital My Book drives have also historically not fared well either. Consumers want these devices to be nearly silent, and the tradeoff is product design that omits what is often the single most important component to guarantee a longer drive life - a cooling fan.

Although both series of drives seemed to get equally warm to the touch (but not uncomfortably hot), the single most important concern I have about Western Digital's entire My Book product line is drive longevity and data integrity. The last version of this product had scores of complaints about drive failures, almost always resulting in partial or total loss of your data. Most seemed to either fail during the first week of use or right around the first anniversary of purchase.

Different hard drives, depending on design, can generate more or less heat. It's not possible to tell precisely what model hard drive is being used in v2.0 (and whether it's an upgrade in quality from the earlier model), but perhaps Western Digital will have noticed the relatively high number of drive failures from its earlier product line and has used a different model for v2.0. Time will tell.

Both versions of the My Book series seem to offer adequate ventilation on the top, back, and bottom of the unit. Airflow will be very important to allow the heat from the hard drive to dissipate. In any external case without a fan to move air through the unit, or a heat sink to collect and bleed off the heat from the drive, the temperature inside the case will easily exceed 120 degrees, if not much higher if you reduce or block any of the ventilation holes. The higher the temperature, the sooner your drive will fail.

As with all USB external drives, the time spent transferring files back and forth will be much longer than experienced using an internal hard drive. The My Book series is best suited as a backup method to store copies of your important data in case one of your primary hard drives should fail. When powered down (which happens when the drive has not been accessed for around ten minutes), there will be an additional delay when attempting to access files from it, because the drive will need to spin-up (allow around 5-10 seconds for this).

As to the product's quality and longevity, as this is a new product line there is no easy way to guarantee whether this will prove a completely reliable product. But historically, external drives of all kinds tend to live shorter lives than internal drives, and Western Digital's warranty for this model remains one year. For $25 you can extend the warranty for two additional years from Western Digital's website.

But remember, it doesn't matter how long the warranty lasts if your data is gone because of a drive failure. No warranty will cover the costs to recover data from a failed drive (which can easily exceed $1000 with no guarantee of success). Do not rely on any hard drive to protect your most precious files alone. Every hard drive fails eventually. Instead, consider using the My Book Essential as a hard drive backup of your primary drives. Or if you need to rely on an external drive for day to day use, consider purchasing a second unit and using that to backup the first in case catastrophe strikes.

You can also prolong the life of your drive yourself by keeping it cool. I have a small inexpensive desk fan set on low blowing across my stack of external drives which does a good job. I also keep papers off of the drive, away from the sun or any heat vents.

Also pay attention to the sound your drive makes - it can be an early indicator of imminent failure. A whining or grinding sound (like a power saw off in the distance) is a clear danger sign. Loud clicking sounds when the drive is accessing data should sound a red alert that your drive is about to die. And should you encounter "delayed write failures" or other errors increasing in frequency as the drive ages, you should begin planning its replacement. Unfortunately, sometimes drives suddenly fail with no warning, so please create a backup strategy today before you lose up to 465 gigabytes of your files tomorrow.

Let's keep our fingers crossed that Western Digital has corrected the flaws from the first version of this product line. It's too bad the power switch is gone and they've switched to the less common USB-mini connectors, but as long as it keeps my data safe and secure, I can live with the changes.

I'm an experienced computer technician with 20+ years of on the job experience. I am a firm supporter of Western Digital internal drives, and have always used them. When the My Book drives were released several years ago, I was enthusiastic that a low-cost external drive solution was available from my preferred hard drive vendor.

After years of using these drives in both a professional and personal capacity, and after having the last of my 5 personal My Book drives die today, I felt compelled to write a review warning people away from them.

In my workplace we had been using My Book drives exclusively for the last 4 years. Over that four year period, more than 50% of the drives we deployed for use in backup solutions died. We would always RMA the drives (they would usually fail within a year), but the replacements would also fail eventually (with a recurring fail rate of about 50%).

All 5 of the drives I have purchased for personal use have failed. The last drive to die was the one that died today. It's one month out of warranty (1 year). While WD might very well replace it (they have excellent customer support), I am throwing it away and giving up on the My Book line for good.

While I will continue using WD internal drives (they perform flawlessly over many years), I must strongly advise people to NOT use the external My Book drives, especially when using them in a 24/7, frequent write capacity (like backing up or transferring large amounts of data). There must be some inherent flaw in their design. Strangely enough, I have had great success with the Western Digital Passport line of drives. Those I can recommend highly. I have 3 of them, all over 2 years old and subject to frequent use, and all are performing flawlessly. I have also deployed many of these drives in a professional capacity and have yet to have a failure. The fact that the Passport drives are self-powered is a great added bonus. You have been warned!

I have two of these, and I use them for backups. I do not consider them to be reliable enough for use as a primary drive - backups only!

Consider the previous negative reviews in the proper context. The previous reviewers who used one of these drives as primary storage without backing up were asking for trouble. If your primary or backup drive fails, just replace it. Hard drives will fail unexpectedly, but that's why you make backups, right?

There's no guarantee that an external drive (like this one) will be any more reliable than your primary internal drive; indeed, the 3-year warranty internal drives are probably somewhat more reliable than the 1-year external drives, so use an internal drive for backup if you can. However, these drives are very convenient as backup media... just don't have unreasonable expectations.

hth!

I purchased one of these units last December for use as expansion space to hold music and photographs. It failed 5 days ago, unable to "be seen" by either my Mac or Windows computer; it worked one day, failed the next without being touched or moved; in other words, no physical damage to it by me. I had about 40 Gigs of data on this 500 Gig drive.

Suspecting either the power supply or USB-to-PATA interface card, I contacted Western Digital(WD) to see what I had to do to recover my data and have the defective unit repaired or replaced. I suspected that the drive itself was probably OK because of the nature of the failure to be seen at the interface. They told me that IF I tried to open the unit and recover the data from the drive, that that action would "void my warranty". Only if I paid one of their "preferred partners" [a minor fortune] to open the unit and recover my data to DVDs would they honor the warranty on their obviously defective product. If I had them send me a replacement unit, and subsequently returned the original unit in a "tampered condition" [i.e. I opened it to get at the hard drive to recover my data] they would then charge the retail price [$169, more than the current Amazon price for a NEW one] to my credit card. No person in their right mind would ever use this "warranty", so, in effect YOU HAVE NO WARRANTY for Western Digital products, unless you are willing to throw away your data or pay more than the price of a new drive to recover the data which THEY should have recovered for you in a repair department and sent back to you installed on a new drive. They obviously would rather just toss you another empty made-in-Thailand drive, or intimidate you out of using the warranty you paid for, than operate a proper repair service at US labor costs, to help you recover your data.

So, AVOID THIS PRODUCT LIKE THE PLAGUE. Buy one of the many Amazon "external hard drive enclosures" and a separate hard drive from Maxtor, Hitachi, Seagate, or other manufacturers who support their products; then, if the enclosure fails, you can open it up without "voiding the warranty" and recover your data if the drive itself is OK.

I went ahead and opened this defective unit, removed the hard drive and installed it on a desktop computer as a SLAVE drive, and am now copying the data to the main drive on that computer; nothing was wrong with the drive, only with their controller, as I suspected. I will buy an empty external enclosure from Amazon, and reuse this drive until it fails. I will also never buy another Western Digital product, because their warranty policy and customer service attitude STINKS. You can decide if you want to buy from this company at your own risk.

Don't buy this if you think your power will ever go out, or you might pull the plug.

My hard drive was getting full. I had lots of family photos and music files and various other stuff. So i bought the Western Digital 500GB My Book and 'moved' 62G of files onto it. A week later I go to find something and there are no, zero nada files on it. I do notice that the drive letter shows that there is only 420GB free. First help person says, did you ever unplug it. Sure I say, afterall it's a hard drive like the one in your PC you should be able to turn off power. He says oh your data is gone then!!!!

I tell him that there must be something on there taking up that space but he doesn't understand me so i ask him to escalate (we're dealing with India now). Finally after several hours and requests to escalate since I know there is data on there, I get a very smart person who understands right away what i am saying regarding only 420GB free, must be data on the drive. He has me run some sort of scan and it finds all my files!!!! Whoohoo right?

Wrong, it just finds the data, and gives them new filenames like 000001.chk, 000002.chk, 000003.cha and so on for 30,000 files or so. The help desk guy then sympathises and recommends some software, you can purchase, that will go through all the files and put the correct extensions on them.

So hour and days later i have 3,000 .txt files with no names, and 2,000 .jpg files and 5,000 .ppt .... and so on. Now i get to open each one and name it appropriately.

Do you want to go through this experience? If you have no fear that your power will ever go out, or you'll accidently pull the plug then go ahead, buy it.

I do own a Maxtor exernal for my other PC, 2 years now, multiple power downs and no data loss.

I got one and my dad got one - both have failed in less than a year. Stay away from this piece of junk.

My WD MyBook 500GB lived for just over a year (just long enough for the warranty to expire) before beginning a slow decline toward total death. Luckily I had time to get my files off in time. Admittedly, my experience is with the version 1 of this drive and so you may cling to the hope that the new version 2 drives will be better, but consider this... how long is the warranty on the new version? Still one year. So if the people who make it have no confidence that their drives will last much more than a year, then should you trust your data to that same drive?

Look through these reviews at the number of us who have had our drives fail with only a year or so of use and learn from our mistakes. Don't trust your data to a drive that isn't warrantied for at least 3 years. It's not so much about the warranty itself; it's what the length of warranty tells you about the quality the manufacturer designed into the product. In an industry where a 3-5 year warranty is the standard, I should have recognized the one-year warranty on this as the red flag it is. So should you.

I just got this drive two days ago and already I'm not a fan. I bought it for two reasons: backup and video editing.

The two nice things I have to say about it: It was a good price ($100) and it does hold files.

Previously, I had an HP 160 GB external hard drive that I was retiring simply because it was full and I didn't want to erase the existing data.

First, I made the mistake of installing the software that comes with it. My advice: don't. It's not that great, the backup software is a trial version, it's s-l-o-w, and something in the install messed up my add / remove programs utility.

Second, in comparison with my old 6-year-old external drive, it's S-L-O-W....really, really slow.

So, I'll be looking for something better.

I am utterly disappointed with my external drive. It's just been a little over a year since purchase and it has malfunctioned. The warranty expired after a year, how convenient. We phoned technical support. We were offered to be transferred to a phone technician for a fee to help us troubleshoot the problem. After paying the $15 fee, we were in contact with a technician only for him to tell us that we need to replace our drive. No diagnostics, no further questions, no attempts to merely reboot the computer, nothing. The total time in contact with the technician was approximately 5 minutes, and I was placed on hold for at least a minute in between. Now, I will need to fork up an additional $500-plus to recover the data (i.e. family pictures for the last 8 months, most of which were of my newborn son) that may or may not exist on my malfunctioned drive.

Do you see any warranty information on this drive? There's a reason for that.....it's only 1 year. I found out the hard way when mine died after 15 months. Seagate has 5 year warranties on their externals. Don't take the chance with a company that won't back it's product.