Customer Reviews

Western Digital WDG2TP10000N My Book Pro Edition II 1 TB USB/Firewire Triple Interface External Hard Drive

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(31)

 

 

I totally have to agree with the earlier reviewer who mentioned the noise level on this thing. The box, the site, the descriptions all take great pains to describe this as a whisper-quiet, fanless system. They are all wrong. The thing is like having a 747 start up in your office. it's deafeningly loud. It's great that you can get 1TB of storage to sit on your desktop, but at the expense of your peace and quiet? i dunno... it's becoming a hard trade-off. There doesn't appear to be any way around it either. Once the fan starts you're typically in for at least 20 minutes of full-blast, wind-tunnel action. If you can tolerate the noise, it's a near ideal storage solution.

I bought one of these drives recently and was *shocked* at how loud the internal fan is. Within 5 minutes of turing the drive on and copying over files the fan kicked in and it was like I had a leaf blower in the office. It's totally unusable. Maybe other people are fine with high levels of fan noise or put them in already loud areas, but put this thing in a quiet office and it's brutal. I'm returning it asap. I have no idea if this is a one-off situation or they're all like this. It doesn't seem to be defective and there is nothing in the software to reduce fan speed or lower the noise level. Just thought I'd post this as a warning to people who are looking at these drives. Buyer beware.

I bought the My Book Premium Edition II 1TB external drive. (1 year warranty, darker color, comes with backup software) I too have this really loud intermitent fan noise which is louder than 2 PVR, one Dish receiver, 3 outher external hard drives, a PC and an AV receiver combined times 3. I can hear it from the next room. Not tolerable unless it can be corrected.

When shopping for external storage, I wanted something that not only provided a lot of GB's for my dollar, but would also provide redundancy. After all, an external hard drive is no more reliable than the internal drive in your computer, and I've had far too many hard drive crashes and lost data to have it happen again.

This device is a perfect combination. In RAID 1 configuration, each of the unit's two disk drives contains an exact copy of the data, so that if one fails you need only replace one drive and rest easy, because the data is safely stored on the secondary disk. I also read that Western Digital will send out a replacement drive so you can replace it yourself, eliminating the need to send your precious remaining drive to some factory somewhere. Just keep in mind that with this configuration, you have only 500 GB of storage since both of the disks contain the same data.

I also wanted the triple interface. I have a couple of Macs with Firewire 400 ports, and I have a PC with USB 2.0. Someday if I buy a newer Mac it may have Firewire 800, and this external drive is ready for them all.

It took only a minute to install the software on my Mac Book Pro, and most of that time was spent doing a reboot (an unfortunate drawback, and the first time that I've ever had to reboot after installing new software).

ABOUT THE NOISE: There are a lot of negative comments about the noise, but considering all of the benefits I went ahead and took the plunge. And boy am I PLEASED with that decision! There is a brief power-up fan noise when the device is first connected to power, but after that it is whisper quiet. As I type this review, I'm in the middle of moving 20 GB of old files to the drive and there is no noise whatsoever.

There are a few drawbacks too. The marketing literature promotes the unit's capacity meter built into the from LED indicator. You must have the drive connected to a computer with the driver installed for this feature to work, making it mostly worthless in my case (where I connect to multiple computers, some with no drivers installed). Sometimes the drive goes to sleep upon long period of inactivity, and takes 5-10 seconds to wake again. This is a minor annoyance, but nowhere near a deal breaker.

Here are my positives and negatives:

PROS

- Great amount of storage for the price
- RAID 1 means no more lost data
- WD offers advance replacement of failed disks
- Triple interface offers excellent flexibility
- Whisper quiet, aside from brief power-on fan noise


CONS

- Capacity meter is mostly useless
- Drive sleeps on long inactivity and wakes slowly


CONCLUSION

Overall I would highly recommend this drive to anyone looking for external storage with built in redundancy at a great price. I feel 100% confident in knowing that my data is properly mirrored and the digital content (in which I have invested money) is also safe for years to come.

I read the negative reviews here, but due to good experiences in the past with WD including wishing to replace my current 250 Gig light up WD USB drive, I thought I'd take the plunge.

As expected I don't really see what the problem is! The styling and build quality is high. It has triple interfaces - so if you have FireWire 800 that is a big bonus!

The only negative I would give is one of the FireWire cables that should have been in the box was not in the box. I've saw other reviews where the cables where missing or mixed up so finding one cable missing did not please me.

I think the drive is great in terms of performance, styling and price.

My biggest concern when buying was all the bad reviews about noise. The drive most of the time is completely silent and if after a certain time it detects no usage, it switches itself off completely. If I copy a DVD to the drive from a slow DVD drive, then the fan does not kick in. If I copy a DVD to the drive from a fast DVD drive, the fan does kick in. And yes it is noisy but not as bad as people have made out. The only caveat I'd add is that I have a suspicion it has another fan stage which is very noisy. My father said when he used the drive to copy 80gig from another hard drive onto it, he could he it in the next room. Western Digital now offer a firmware upgrade (see their site) to try and reduce the noise by increasingly the temperature at which the fan comes in, and which also shuts it off quicker. Personally I'd rather have cool running drives and some noise, so I've opted not to do the firmware upgrade.

As regards the other reviewer saying his broke within 10 days, that can happen with any item. The Canon DSLR broke which I got from Amazon the first week! But that did not stop me getting another one! I've already had this drive on 4 plane journeys and even though it is not built for such travel it is fine.

On the technical front: Windows XP would not see the drive without installing the RAID manager software that comes with it and using it to format the drive (I went to NTFS). After which RAID manager could be uninstalled and then every PC it was plugged into could see it.

I'm very happy with the purchase but will knock off one star for the noise (which I'm not too bothered about) and for the missing firewire cable. I'd certainly not consider another manufacturer (I looked at the others).

I admit at first I was very concerned about the noise the device generated. It sounded like a hair dryer on high a few feet from your head. After I upgraded to firmware version 104 the fan noise is still noticible but is much much quieter.

I think overall this is a very good drive. The RAID feature is very convenient. No more having to backup the drive since it does it automatically.

Bottom line it is that it is a good value and the after the firmware upgrade it is very acceptable fan level.

Great idea. Pretty package. Lousy design.

The first time the internal fan came on I laughed at how loud it was.
The second time the fan came on.. I didn't laugh.
It is like having a hair dryer on your dekstop.

Do not buy until WD works out this issuse.
I called them today and the best advice they could give was
"I guess you ought to keep the drive cool" !

Come on guys..

My LaCie 1 TB USB drive is whisper quiet. All the time.

I just purchased one and love it, its fast, connects to my Mac or PC. As far as fan noise, I have no complaints and when it does spin up its not all that loud, heck my dell laptop makes more fan noise. Having a Maxtor 1TB, the WD is a better choice as it powers on and off (sleep mode) with my Mac. It is slightly larger than the Maxtor but runs much much cooler which is important to long life.

3 major problems with this drive:

1) Firewire worked for a while. Not any more. Now only USB connection will let this thing mount on desktop. Tech support wasn't very helpful. Blamed my computer. I've tried connected to 4 different Macs including a brand spanking new one and it still wouldn't mount.

2) It's actually 2 internal drives RAIDed together. I can't tell you how many times the RAID has gotten corrupted forcing me to reconfigure and start from scratch. It's just one more thing that can go wrong.

3) This thing runs hot. REAL hot. So basically the internal fan has to work outrageously hard It sounds like you left a blow dryer on. If you have a wife you will never hear the end of it. Trust me. And forget about keeping it in an enclosed desk space. Will run so hot it will auto-shut off on you until it cools down. Very convenient.

I think I'm going to throw in the towel and get the new My Book Studio 1TB to replace this thing. It's just not worth the hassle any more.

As someone who is digitizing my CD collection losslessly
(using EAC to extract from my commercial CDs, and FLAC
to compress), I was already pushing 1T with the two
500-gig WD My Books I already have. They deserve 5 stars;
if I give this product 4, it is because of the noise
from the fan: irritating when it is cooling, but since
I play my music loudly, and have become more used to
the background noise, I don't see it as too big an issue.

With a four-port USB 2.0 hub, I use one port for my external
soundcard, leaving three ports: the two 500 gig My Books,
and the 1T My Book Pro. That's 2T !

It of course has firewire, so eventually I may use that
and free up a USB port. Until then, for the cost -- 300
dollars less than the Maxtor 1T -- I feel very satisfied.

Now I just have to rearrange things so all the external
hard drives are in some quiet cooling cabinet. . . .

I like the feature of the drive turning off when not used
for a period of time; this keeps it cooler, so less fan noise,
and you don't have to remember to switch it off, either. Of
course, the main computer loses track of the drives when it
goes into hibernation, but quickly regains info when they
switch back on. They don't tell you, but you DO have to
format the drive for XP when it arrives, otherwise the My Book
1T is not recognized. The software provided lets you choose
whether to use RAID or not; with RAID, it is of course only
500 gig. Since I backup all my music on DVDs, I do not need
RAID, so I have all 1T available for music!