Customer Reviews

Western Digital 80 GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This drive worked beutifully in the first 6-8 months, regardless of the infrequent unexplained miscommunication with the PC. After I trusted it for all my work and research data backup, done just once every month, it suddenly gave clicking sounds and stopped working. After extended agony with the customer support, I got no understanding or even the will to help or just listen. Surperisingly, when I talked about this subject with some of my collegues in our University, I discovered that many of them, in defferent departments, suffered from the same problem with different models of the Wistern Digital external hard drives (USB/Firewire).
After all the frustration and the torture with this piece of junk that I trusted with my work, I can say for sure, Buy WD if you are looking for the best machine to lose your data? Beleive me when I say Western Digital Hard Drives are absolutely the worst for your data storage. We've been there.

Had been through a few electronics stores where several types of hard drives were being sold and I had thought I wouldn't need any of those. Then I saw the price of several external drives come down low ... my kind of low. I thought I might/could use it for backup of important data and programs. Now I find I am using the USB Drive almost every day, for almost every day things, for saving downloaded programs, scaned pictures ... other stuff ... and of course, backup of data and important files. I now can not see myself without the USB External Hard Drive.
Now the wonder if I will think of buying another drive within the next couple of years.

I feel like not enough people write reviews.. so here goes...

Cons: Fairly quite, easy to use just plug and play, reliable... haven't read a bad review of western digital yet, and doesn't run that hot!

Negatives: No on /off switch, I guess the FAT32 could be a negative, but doesn't really concern me cause I don't transfer more than 4 Gig's at a time. No automatic backup software.

All in all this is a great drive, it's reliable and works well, I mean what else do you really want??