Customer Reviews

Western Digital WDG1U2500 My Book Essential Edition 250 GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive

5 star:		(44)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(30)

 

 

It vibrates a bit, but that is easy to forgive in light of the really attractive design, a black-sheen case that evokes nothing less than a futuristic bible. Or maybe a Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

The Essential edition sports a green circle of light, and a single USB2 connection. The Essential edition is the budget edition of the line, lacking a FireWire connection and without a second ring of light that indicates (on the Premium and Pro editions) how much room is left on the drive. But who needs that? And personally I prefer the green illumination, anyway.

The circle of light doubles as an on/off button, conveniently located on the front. You may not need to tap that button much though, since the drive senses when you Shut Down (or Hibernate or Stand-By) your computer and automatically turns off.

Essentially, the design of the case and the automatic on/off are the two main reasons why these drives have become so popular within weeks of their debut. It took me three weeks to score one of these on sale.

You've probably read that the vents are a code. It reportedly spells out words such as "innovative", "reliable", "personal", "design", and "simple". The design of this drive is certainly innovative. The last memorable time when a designer got involved in making a case for an external hard drive was when the LaCie company hired F.A. Porche, but Porche, in what one could speculate was a bit of a cruel joke on LaCie, turned in a generic metallic brick (ooh I bet that angered LaCie). Western Digital, in contrast, has turned in a strikingly elegant case that would look great on a shelf. Expect other companies to follow suit with shelf-worthy case designs, now that good aesthetics have been introduced to this formerly purely-functional line of products.

One small unexpected complaint. You can see why they dubbed it "My Book", but rather inconveniently for anyone who is actually writing a book and already has a folder named "My Book", this drive is formatted with the name pre-designated as "My Book". But authors need not worry; that name is easily erased when one reformats the drive to the NTFS standard that current computers use (like nearly all hard drives, it arrives formatted in the old FAT32 format to accomodate users of older computers). Just plug it in, reformat the drive to NTFS (which takes an hour or so for a drive this size), and then it is ready to serve you. The drive came with some software on it, but none of it is needed.

So far, so good. If no one reports any design flaws, I expect people will be "swearing by" this book... ok that pun was lame.

Four stars rather than five, because of the slight vibration.

I bought 2 of these drives to backup digital photos that would no longer fit on my hard drive. I keep the same thing on both of them, just in case one crashes. So far I have had no problems. Plus the Google Picasa2 software that comes on the drives is nice for sorting all of my photos in an easy to view way. The drives are also pretty small and fit nicely on a small shelf beside my computer. They are also pretty quite while running, unlike some of WD's previous drives. If you need extra space, in a compact place, this is a good choice.

steps
1- Unboxed it.
2- Plugged the power cord
3- Plugged the usb cable to the computer
4- BAM!!! Additional 250Gb

I didn't install any software. Windows XP automatically recognizes this as an additional logical drive.

The only bad thing is that it comes formatted as FAT from factory. But nothing a good reformat won't solve.

Transfer rate is excellent. I actually plugged this to my server and shared it on windows so I could access it on my home network.

Now I can easily backup files from my laptop to this device (that's actually connected to the server)


For those giving bad reviews because it crashed... Keep it in mind that it's a hard drive... Hard drives do crash... That's just something they do. You should always keep 2 backups. Actually, I'm now researching online backup services (like Genie Backup).
What good are 10 backups in my house if there's a fire (knock on wood) and it destroys my computer and all the backups I had.

Really great product for the price.

This is another case of having the drive for literally 2 days and having it work once. It worked long enough to install on 3 different computers, and transfer several gigs worth of data onto the unit itself with no problem. However once I tried to plug it back in to one of those same computers to transfer the data off of it, it died. Now, out of the three that it was installed on, none of them will even recognize it anymore for the short periods of time that it stays powered on (seems random). I'm an experienced user, and the item was never dropped or misused in any way. WD tech support took over a week to return email and was of no help, asking me if I'd done things that I already told them I had in my initial email. Their final reply was to simply send it back for a replacement, but after reading other stories, I doubt I'll even mess with it. An expensive loss, but lesson learned.

We bought 6 for our office as back-up drives for each pc. They are now around 6 months old and have never failed. They work flawlessly. I don't know why people say they have had crashes. We back up large projects daily and have never had an issue with any of them.

I would highly recommend them to anyone considering an external hard drive.

Just a update we still have the original 6 drives and after 18 plus months of heavy use none have failed...

The 250GB My Book external hard drive from Western Digital is a great place to store all of your extra photos, videos and mp3s. I find that the 250GB Essential (essential meaning lowest pricing tier) hits the sweet spot between space and price.

For about 100$ (I actually got mine at Office Depot for less because of a great mail-in rebate) you get double the space of a cheaper 79$ 100GB drive. This is great because once you have all that space you'll fill it up quickly.

The single USB 2.0 connection is more then enough to play music, view/edit pictures and movies. Writing to the drive is slower then reading. I have edited video stored on the hard drive with little issues of speed or write/read times. The drive itself is fairly appealing to the eyes. It looks like a black leather-bound book. Of course with two wires (one for power and one for USB) it totally destroys that image but what can you do? The little green light around the button is cool.

The drive has two nifty features. The first is the auto-on/off. When not in use for a while the drive will simply shut off. It will turn itself on when you access it. This is a great feature because at 7,200RPMs this drive can get loud! Especially in an enclosed desk area. The second feature is that of a push-button backup utility. Good feature but I'll probably never use it.

Pros: Storage space vs. price, little green light, auto-on/off, mail-in rebate (if you can find one)
Cons: Noise, all those stupid wires, smaller drives can be had for less

Conclusion: A very nice hard drive especially considering the storage space vs. price issue when considering other external hard drives.

I bought drive to backup my work files. Great design, fairly compact. No software included for backups so you have to provide your own. Worked fine for 1 month but drive failed. Would not power up.

RMA process costly and at your expense. You must ship in anti-static bag (so save box). No communication or response to 4 e-mails I sent - never had a company be so unresponsive. Not only did I lose 1 month of backups but it cost me quite a bit to ship back.

Recommend if you buy it to don't rely solely on it for at least a few months. You have a chance of losing your only copy of something if the drive fails. Hope replacement is more reliable.

*Update* Replacement drive was new (not refurbished) and has worked fine ever since. I must have gotten a bad unit. Drive is pretty quiet and power up quickly and is pretty intelligent to power down when not it use. Will be buying Acronis True Image or Norten Ghost to back up images/quicker to restore system than just backing up files.

This thing was almost TOO simple to set up. You just plug it in and it's all set. Some people will look for a CD or some other software and be frustrated, but you're assuming more complication than there is. The software is on the hard drive and it installs itself.

I also reformatted the drive to the newer standard, and I lost some GB in the process, don't know why, but with my computer it took less than a minute to reformat and partition the drive. I put programs in one section and files in the other.

The drive does turn off, or, as I think about it, go into sleep mode if you don't use it for a while. That means when you go to save something, you have to wait a couple of extra seconds for it to wake up. Once I understood this it didn't bother me.

I have this on my shelf, and not only does it look cool, I can't hear it at all.

You can't go wrong with this drive, especially for the price with all these rebates around.

Purchased a new WDG1U2500 on September 9, 2006. Had to have it replaced and mailed the unit to WD. The replacement was also defective and it was a REFURBISHED one. Returning a defective new unit and receiving a refurbished one in exchange is not right. I hope the second replacement will be a NEW one. Had to pay USPS $17.70 (includes insurance and tracking) for the first return. Hope to make positive comments and give better rating after receiving a replacement and being able to use it. At the moment I wish I had not purchased the unit.

I have owned a WD MyBook Essential Edition for about one year now. The first one I purchased was defective. Disappointed, I traded it in. The one I own now have has operated flawlessly. It's always there when I look for it in My Computer, its fast and its quiet. The design is interesting as well. Being an engineer, I just had to open one up for a peek inside. I was surprised by the build quality. The disk is well dampened and protected. Western Digital has also gone to great lengths to make it difficult to open- But thats beside the point :)

I am very satisfied with my My Book, and I don't see why you would'nt be either. A 5/5 for a very solid product.