Customer Reviews

Western Digital My Book Home Edition 320 GB USB 2.0/FireWire 400/eSATA Desktop External Hard Drive

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Just fyi, but the software is included with this device. You need to enter the software key that is printed on a lable and stuck to the "installation guide". If you do that, the backup software shifts from being a "trial version" to a fully licensed and functional version. Thus far, it seems to work well.

This drive works great. I needed a drive to store 50-100GB of images for access from our company website, and I was concerned that the access speed would be an issue (not to mention the sleep mode I've heard others talk about). I bought the IOGear eSATA 3Gbps RAID 5 adapter from Amazon, and man is it fast. For those of you who said that USB seemed to be about the same or faster than eSATA... well, you need to try this eSATA card. Using USB, it took 1 min 14 secs to copy a 197mb file to the drive. It only took 8 secs using eSATA. A little side note... this card only works in a PCIe (express) slot.

Needless to say, this drive is quiet (no fans), and only slightly warm. While copying 50gb of images on to it, the drive never got warmer than the screen on my flat panel monitor. I've read that the light on the front only indicates drive activity if you're using USB or Firewire, but mine works the same for eSATA too.

I've only had the drive for two days, but it's working great so far. It's a winner in my book. (no pun intended)

Apart from making my other portable hard drives look rather frumpy, I have no complaints about this hard drive. It turned itself on when I first plugged it in and autoran the installer for the software that is included. I deleted the stuff, so I can't say whether it was good or not, but it was bundled software, so you can probably guess. Regardless, all I needed was more space to store my stuff, and the fact that it sits there all black and sleek and pulses with light in the front makes it good eye-candy, too. It's a portable hard drive, it works, it's cheap, and it's sexy. I win!

The WD My Book Home Edition (320gb) is an excellent drive and the hardware has given me no problems. It runs very quietly, it is well vented and so does not heat up, it turns on and off (smartly) either with its own power button or when the computer is powered on and off, and it offers firewire, eSATA, and USB connections. The caveat here is the software that comes with the drive. The drive I purchased was new but was built six months ago, and the free backup software was an older version that is very buggy with Vista. (Note, there is a Product Key for the software on the white installation sheet that you'll need to enter at setup.) The software (MEMEO) website was not at all helpful in handling the problems I encountered. But MEMEO customer service was superb. A technician responded quickly to an e-mail, precisely diagnosed the problem, and provided clear directions for removing the older version and installing (at no cost) the most current version. The current version works very well, and automatically backs up files seamlessly. One other note on setup. The drive comes formatted with FAT32. That's fine if your files are no bigger than 4gb. But if you want to save a larger file (e.g., a video file), you'll need to reformat the drive with NTFS, and you might as well do that at the beginning because you'll lose all the data on the drive when you reformat. At the same time you also may want to partition the drive, to isolate different kinds of files from one another. The backup software allows you to create different "plans" for this purpose. Happily, the Western Digital telephone support (free for 30 days) was very helpful in walking me through the process.

I purchased this hard drive mostly for back-up purposes and chose this particular one for it's size and firewire connection. I did not use the included software since this drive is connected to a Mac using "Time Machine" software but I can say that "Time machine" is quite compatible with this drive. I have had no problems with this drive within the first week. Do yourself a favor and buy sheilded cables, don't depend on the cheap cables the drive comes with.

I've put the drive on a bookshelf next to my desk and it fits in nicely. It has a little LED on the front that goes off and stuff, but I don't see it doing anything meaningful.

The OS X software is OK. It's a little slow, and I could not find the serial number for the trial software in the box. -1 star for that.

I have been using this unit for almost two years now.
Very fast, solidly reliable so far.
This unit is very quiet, whether accessing files or not.
Installing it into XP was simple no-hassle plug and play.

Back when I thought a 20 meg hard drive was huge, I never imagined that I would fill my 120 gig hard drive on my laptop with video files (often more than 20 meg per file!) and face a space crisis. Well, I did, so I bought this 320 gig portable external hard drive. It transports well and it has relieved the space issue on my laptop. It does require electricity, so it's not like you can take it up on a mountaintop with your laptop, but you can get rid of stuff you don't use all the time and store it. You can also back up your computer on this (although using their software may be problematic).

Having read the reviews of this, I elected not to use the included software and I like this hard drive very much.

Bought three of these drives, working well so far. Like the multiple connection options, make it easy to use on PC or Mac.

I like the design and flexibility of this drive. It seems to work very well. My gripe is that the 'Home Edition' My Book drives are advertised as coming with backup software. It is advertised this way on the box as well as on the WD website. The reality is that a 30 day trial of backup software is included. If you want to continue to use it, it's a $30 fee to purchase the software.

This is just disappointing more than anything else. In my opinion, it is a blatant lie to say that it comes with software when they really only include a 30 day trial.

Maybe this is just a mistake on the part of WD and they will correct it. But for now, be aware.
If you don't care about the backup software, then this seems like a good drive.