Western Digital 80 GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive

by Western Digital

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 4.2 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B0000AKMOS
• Item model number: WDXU800BBRNN
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: March 3, 2004

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Western Digital's USB 2.0 external hard drive makes it possible to add reliable, high-performance storage instantly to your PC or Macintosh. Simply plug into a USB port or USB PCI adapter card and within seconds back up your valuable data or store large multimedia files. Multiple drives stack together and can be routed through a hub, enabling you to further expand your storage capacity. Designed with Western Digital's WD Caviar 7200 RPM hard drive and a high-speed USB 2.0 bridge, this external hard drive provides maximum storage performance.

Product Benefits

• Backward compatible with existing USB 1.1 ports
• The fast and easy way to add instant high-speed storage for both desktop and notebook systems
• Hot-swap capability allows easy connection of a new peripheral without powering off the computer
• Designed with Western Digital's WD Caviar 7200 RPM hard drive and a high-speed USB 2.0 bridge for maximum performance
• Compact and elegant design, easily stackable.
• Backed by Western Digital's commient to data protection and award-winning customer support and services

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars great product... but no manual, January 26, 2004

By 

DC (California USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Western Digital 80 GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive (Personal Computers)

Positives:

- Windows XP plug and play worked as it should.
- Decent speed. I transferred about 10,000 files, 5GB of data in 12 minutes, which comes out to about 7MB/s. The theoretical limit for USB 2.0 is 60MB/s. Taking into consideration the overhead of 10,000 files, I felt the speed was decent.
- Good value for a reliable external drive.

Negatives:

- lacks a user manual! It comes with a quick install poster, which basically just tells you 1. plug in power, 2. connect USB cable, 3. click OK to install. I went to their website thinking I could download a manual, but it doesn't exist!
- as another reviewer mentioned, it's preformatted with FAT32, so you have to reformat it to NTFS yourself. This was harder than expected because there was no user manual. I had to dig in their knowledge base (which, btw, only worked with IE and not Mozilla) to find the info.

Conclusion:

Even though I was astounded that this product had absolutely no manual, I would still recommend this drive because it's a pretty good value. It comes in especially handy for archiving media files because I give my photos and MP3s long file names, so they get truncated on CDROMs. And I have found Western Digital drives to be reliable.

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great!!, December 29, 2003

By 

vivisimonvi "vivisimonvi" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Western Digital 80 GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive (Personal Computers)

I've only owned this product for a month now and have run into almost no problems so far. Installation was tricky at first as this is preformatted for FAT32 (you're only limited to less than 4GB files with FAT32), I have Win XP. Reformatting to NTFS is not as easy as a simple 'format,' you might have to go through the Administrative Tools under the Control Panel and go through deleting the partition present and setting a new primary partition, then it's ready to go! I mainly use this drive to capture video footage through the USB 2.0 connection (NOTE: a firewire connection would be faster for this, but this does NOT have firewire capabilities). I can say this can handle the huge transfers without my capture program dropping frames (it can transfer/create a 1 Gigabyte file in under 2 minutes). I suppose this thing is meant to stay on around the clock as it has no power switch (just unplug when not in use). I also have a Buslink external 40GB harddrive that I use in conjunction with this one, I can't say which is better as they both do what they're meant to do. Both are the same except the Buslink has a power switch, that I turn off when not in use. This one on the other hand I'm leaving on to see how it fares along the road.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Terrible reliability, December 11, 2004

By 

K. Jager "SeaWind2" (CT) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Western Digital 80 GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive (Personal Computers)

My first drive failed after only 2 months causing the loss of all my backup data. The replacement drive just failed again only 6 months later. Since the replacement drive was only given a 90-day warranty (gee...I wonder why?), I am now out a drive and my data. Customer support was horrible and they do not stand behind their products. I will never buy another WD product nor will I recommend them.