Customer Reviews

Western Digital My Book Pro Edition 250GB External Hard Drive with Triple Interface ( WDG1T2500N )

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I was one of those people who was a bit skeptical on pre-built external hard drives like this one. I always believed that buying a hard drive and a case separately saves more money and would be more efficient. However, this product proved me sort of wrong. The price difference isn't much, and the performance is satisfying. The drive is pre-formatted to FAT32, but I made a partition and differed it with a HFS and NTFS formats. The interface is great since it supports Firewire 400, 800, and USB2.0

Also, the heat level is great. It never gets hot even when I use it for long hours. It stays at a warm level at the most.

I would recommend this product without a doubt.

I purchased this to replace a Maxtor OneTouch III that didn't work (right out of the box). This drive has been awesome. Setup was child's play...just plug it in and it installs itself, including the software which is already on the harddrive (no software CD). It's very fast and extemely quiet, even while backing up. The EMC Retrospect software works well for me and it backs up my main hard drive everynight like clockwork. I've had it for three months now and so far it has given me no problems. I highly recommend this hard drive.

I have found the My Book extremely useful as a backup device to use with my iMac that has a 160 GB hard drive . I have used it in two modes. One, I have used it with the Retrospect application program to backup my entire hard disk without difficulty. When I want to backup a single file or folder, I just drag the icon to the My Book icon. In either mode it has worked flawlessly. I have not used any of its other features or even had a reason to download its disk so far, so I can't be a judge of its performance in exporting data. It's a bit heavy which may be a factor to those who need its portability. I keep mine on my desk most of the time and enjoy its quiet performance and small space reqirements.

My Book Pro Edition is an adequate backup drive, but I was disappointed that two of the main features of the unit -- the illuminated fuel gauge which tells you how much disc space is currently being used and the automatic shutdown when you turn off your computer -- don't work as advertised.

After troubleshooting, reinstalling the drive and spending over an hour with Western Digital tech support, I sent it back to the reseller and had another one sent. Unfortunately, I had the same problem with the replacement unit, so apparently this is a flaw with all the units.

I'm using an iMac G5 with the latest OS installed, so everything's current.

Oh yeah, and the Retrospect back up software that's bundled with it doesn't work.

My Book Pro Edition is functional and is cool-looking, but most of the bells and whistles that are advertised don't work properly. Therefore, I cannot give a full endorsement of this product.

These seem to be very solid performers to this point. I bought three of them for video editing and backup. No problems thus far, and they do perform routine backups as advertised.

Don't believe the claim that you can "just plug it in and it's ready to use." This product is set up for Windows, and the instructions for installing the drive for a Mac fail to mention that you have to reformat the drive to remove the Windows software. It's easy to become hopelessly fouled up.

Don't expect any help from Western Digital. If you can actually get connected to them, and your call isn't dropped while you wait for 40 minutes or so, you'll get a customer rep who reads to you from the same useless manual that came from the drive. Their web site help is equally useless.

Very easy installation. Could have been four stars for the power button not working reliably and the drive was becoming mysteriously unavailable in it's first weeks of use. Not an issue any more... may very well have been malicious content on my drive that has since been ushered out. All is working now. All photos videos music and lesser used files run from it, what a relief to clear up all that space!

The Retrospect software included with this hard drive is not for the novice. I've used a Western Digital external hard drive successfully for my Windows computer, but after a several hours of fiddling with the software I still haven't achieved a successful backup on my Mac. WD customer support for the Mac has been useless; the software supplier, EMC, wanted $70 to consider my questions.

I bought the 750Gb version of this drive to run in conjunction with my new iMac 24" Intel and more specifically Time Machine to back everything up.

As has been stated earlier this drive comes formatted FAT32 to work with Windows, and unless you buy one from the Apple store you're going to need to reformat it to work with Apple.

It's pretty easy...just follow the following instructions:

1) Plug in the drive and power it up

2) Open "Disk Utility" located in your Applications > Utilities directory.

3) Select the drive in the sidebar on the left hand side (Select the higher of the two icons)

4) Click on the "Partition" tab on the right hand side

5) Under Volume Scheme select the drop down tab where it says "Current" and change to "1 Partition".

6) Click on Options at the bottom and select the "GUID Partition Table" radio button

7) Under Format on the menu select "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

8) Click Apply at the bottom and you should be all done.

9) Once it's finished formatting unplug the drive from the firewire or USB port and then plug it in again at which point you will be offered a dialog box asking if you want to use the drive for Time Machine.

..and that's it.

The reviews above where people give it one star because they can't be bothered to spend 5 minutes googling these instructions on the web are pretty poor. I find the data transfer rate on FW800 VERY fast, and the drive has worked faultlessly to date.

i've actually had no problems using this product on both mac and pc. works great except the firewire 400 connector stopped working afer about 2 days. Luckily theres usb as well but still its cheap and effective