Customer Reviews

Western Digital My Book Essential 2 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(24)

 

 

I go to Amazon whenever I want to purchase any equipment, even if I purchase it somewhere else. I do this because the reviews are amongst the best you can find on the internet. However, anyone who has read reviews like this for more than a few months begins to realize that reviews are written by 1) those who have received a defective product, or has a feature they don't like, or 2) those who truly love a product. You never hear from the other 99% of the customers purchasing the product who don't fit in these categories. In particular, purchasers who get a defective product are typically angry and vindictive, as though it was a personal vendetta. I find this unbelievable, as buying any product has a risk of failure attached to it. These angry reviewers don't accurately reflect the failure rate of a device, or the commonest opinion of a product characteristic.

I purchased the 2 Tb drive and it works fine. I did NOT install the Smartware, as I wanted to selectively back up specific directories. Some customers will want the auto back up, and that works for them. The case is no cheaper or poorly-designed than any other mass-produced electronic product these days. I don't find the switch to be a problem--it's designed to prevent accidental shut off of the device. If you want a large back up drive for a decent price, this works fine. If you want ultimate flexibility, get an external drive not designed for simple back up. Complainers should get a life.....

Hello people- you are either being lazy or incompetent. Western Digital's website gives you instructions on how to disable the SmartWare technology (which is, in a word, horrible). After doing so, the drive operates just like any other external hard drive. WD should include this information upfront and let the user choose how to configure their HD- clearly an error by their product team. However, a quick Google search got me where I needed to go. Drive works great- 2TB for $200.

Link to instructions on how to disable SmartWare:
[...]

I have seriously mixed feelings about this product. It's a decent hard drive, but the bundled software sucks (see below).
Pros:
- HDtune was showing an average read transfer rate around 32 MB/s, which isn't bad for USB 2.0.
- The outer casing is very nice looking, but somewhat flimsy. Part of the back panel wasn't snapped in completely on mine, so I had to pop it back into place.
- Drive can be used for storage without installing the included software

Cons:
- WD embedded their software on a virtual CD drive partition on the drive.
- The virtual CD disk partition can actually be disabled in the device manager in Windows. After you do that, the partition will disappear from "My Computer". I'm not sure about the workaround for macs
- If you do try the software, be aware that it runs in the background all the time. Even with the drive unplugged it will randomly consume 60-80% of your CPU. My i7 8-threaded CPU was getting all threads loaded up to this amount. It's not even doing any back up operations. I got so sick of killing the process that I just uninstalled the software. I'm running windows 7 and it has a fairly easy to use backup system. I've moved over to that and it works fine with this drive. You can also just drag and drop files on the drive as well.

PLEASE READ THE LATEST REVIEWS OF THIS PRODUCT FIRST! WD HAS APPARENTLY CORRECTED MANY OF THE INITIAL COMPLAINTS ABOUT SMARTWARE SOFTWARE. Here is my story (and keep in mind that every review is just one person's experience, good or bad, and that the vast majority of purchasers do not submit a review, in most cases most likely because they had little/no problem with the product).

Yesterday I received my WD My Book Essential 2TB External Drive with Smartware. I also downloaded the online complete user's guide from the WD website (something which it appears many of those who had a negative experience did not do). Installing was very easy, but just to be sure, on a couple of points, I called the WD support line, immediately got through and every time the techie was helpful and resolved the issue. The software installed, no problem, and the drive appears to be running, no problem. All my files (about 60 GB) were backed up in less than two hours, as the WD techie predicted. Since then, the drive has been working fine, no excessive on and off, just humming in the background with minimal activity. And this is on default settings. I get no intrusive "pop-up" of any icons. Yes, the smartware shows as a CD drive on the My Computer panel, but so what. All in all, the drive is doing just what it claims to do.

FYI, my computer is a relatively new Gateway with a Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OS, Intel Core 2 Quad processor, with 6 GB of RAM memory and a 1 TB hard drive. It gives no indication of being slowed by the Smartware software. My guess is that my experience is probably pretty typical of many if not most buyers of this product. So far so good, and I will report back if I have an unexpected problem. And BTW, my purpose in buying the drive was to obtain an efficient, easy-to-use means of keeping my computer backed up on a real-time basis, without having a scheduled backup period and a lengthy backing up, each time, of the entire contents of my computer. Once it conducts its initial backup, the My Book only backs up what has been newly added to my computer. Exactly what I want.

I love my new Western Digital 2TB external hard drive. It's perfect for my ever expanding iTunes library. It plugs in and plays perfectly right out of the box. There are 1.8 gigs of usable storage space on this drive. This is my third and largest external hard drive. I've loved them all. No problems whatsoever. I'm using my smaller externals for photo storage.

2TB for this price seems a good deal, and WD is an established name... so, I grabbed it without checking for reviews. This was a mistake which you, gentle reader, are hopefully not making...

The software for this device is haphazard, confusing, actively harmful. And it takes up space you paid for! Given all the other negative reviews of the software I've found online since, it leaves a bad impression of WD that they have not done anything about it.

The hard drive itself runs quietly, though the case has fairly cheap feeling construction. The power button feels fragile.

When you connect the drive:
(1) 'SmartWare' software auto-installs. That would be convenient, if the software weren't terrible. It also does not offer an uninstall option, and the tray icon it adds, while it offers an 'Exit' option, does not actually exit.
(2) When the application starts it shows the drive has 1.8TB free. (That's odd, I paid for 2TB...)
(3) It then proceeds to index your files in a confusing way -- not by directory but by file type (Pictures, Music, ...). Does backing up this way work? I'll never know, it was so painfully slow it literally would have taken a day to back up my 200GB main drive.
(4) So I checked for updates. There's a button in the application for that, but it just takes you to a website. Where you have to manually select your drive and operating system. Clearly, better software could easily make this determination for you and save the world a lot of time and incorrect selections. The site then offers options to update the firmware and the backup tool. (The firmware update requires you to power cycle the drive. The power button doesn't work for this, so you'll have to yank the power cord.)
(5) On attempting to restart the backup, the software just sat there. No indication of progress, no drive activity. After a half hour I exited.

I resorted to a manual backup. The copying runs 3-4x faster that way. No backup management, of course, so that is a major setback.

I will probably keep it simply because it would be too much of a hassle to wipe the drive of my files.

I purchased this from Costco a few days ago. Before opening the box, I took a glance at the reviews here and got a little panicky. But I figured I could return the item to Costco easily, so what did I have to lose by testing it out?

As it turns out, absolutely nothing.

Because I'm a MacBook Pro user (Snow Leopard 10.6.3), this item was plug-and-play for me. As far as WD's much-maligned, pre-installed backup software goes:

1) I don't need it because I use Apple's Time Machine program, which works flawlessly with this drive; and

2) the WD website now offers an optional free download (Windows and Mac) of a very easy fix that permanently prevents the program disc from mounting, which took me no more than 5-10 minutes to download/install. So the seemingly endless numbers of complaints here about the attached software should now be moot.

I had no trouble smoothly connecting the two included cables (power and USB) to the drive and my computer. So far, the drive works quickly and very quietly - much more so than the poorly engineered, overhyped, insanely overpriced Apple Time Capsule that it is replacing on my desk. Finally, this drive takes up no more workspace than a standard paperback book. In a nutshell, the WD My Book Essential drive inconspicuously and effortlessly does exactly what it is supposed to do, and at a long-awaited, record low price for 2TB to boot.

UPDATE ON 7/13/2010: It's been pointed out to me that my review did not address complaints about how it is impossible to delete the reviled backup software. My response is that this is a 2TB drive where that software uses only a very tiny percentage of its space. Given the price and the quality of this product, that insignificantly small loss from the drive's capacity ought to be a trivial consideration for the vast majority of purchasers. Reality Check: Many, if not most, of the people complaining/whining here that they cannot remove this one feature will waste exponentially more space backing up other wholly unnecessary junk onto whichever external drive they own.

I was sold on this drive by the info that I grabbed off Amazon's site about it being able to be powerd by the USB cable. This is quoted from Amazon:

USB 2.0 interface - Powered directly from the USB port on your PC. No separate power supply is needed*.
* An optional cable is available for the few computers that limit power from the USB port.

This isn't true. I tried a powered USB hub as well as USB on several computers. Turns out that this isn't a claim from WD, it is a claim that I could only find on Amazon's site.
Speed: This drive isn't terribly quick. Faster than my old WD but slower than my FD.
Sound: Very quiet.
Style: Looks pretty cool.

I do agree with the other post about the mounting of the fantom CD drive. Let me disable it, and I'll be happy
Would I recommend this drive. Yes. I know the review seems down, but for the money, it is a great deal.

Why does WD change something that doesn't need to be changed. The previous generation of 2TB drives were plug and play great on my MAC. This hunk of junk needs reformating, and then has all this uncessary software autoinstalled. HOrrible. Will never buy another WD harddrive.

Its kind of funny. For all the poor reviews and cursing this 2 TB drive created, it actually is a perfect Mac Time Machine backup device ironically because of its hardware based password security -which of course cant be erased -and is what users are complaining about .

Pros

-Hardware based 256bit encryption based security password security means that my Time Machine Backups are locked up tight. So storing an off site backup of this hard presents no security risks. (assuming of course the hardware security cant be cracked)
-Same sturdy, cheap and simple Western Digital hard drives I have relied on for 3 yrs now as backups.
-Cheap enough (At costco) ($169 w/ coupon) that you you can store a few off site backups and know data is safe.

Cons

-Bloatware non re-movable backup software is useless and eats up 12% of disk space 250 gig of 2TB. They really shot themselves in the foot on this one and makes you wonder how out of touch they are with their customers.
-Western digital should stick to its knitting and just focus on making good hard drives rather than backup software. They have failed multiple times in the past w/ backup software.