Customer Reviews

WesternDigital 250 GB 7200 RPM Firewire/USB 2.0 Hard Drive (WDXC2500JBRNN)

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

 

 

This is simply a standard Western Digital 250GB(*), 7200RPM, 8MB cache hard drive in a cheap plastic case. At this time, this is the largest drive available. I find the 250GB to be misleading, hence the asterisk; Western Digital takes the non-standard convention of 1GB = 1 billion bytes rather than the more standard base 1024 number of 1.07GB (sometimes this interpretation is written "gB" to avoid confusion with "GB"). So I feel cheated on the most distinguishing feature of this drive, it's size.

The nice part about the drive is that I just dropped it in and it worked in Windows XP Pro. I used Firewire at home and USB 1.0 at work. Even with Firewire, it took about 2 and a half hours to fill up the drive with my music backups, which is why I got it. That works out to about 20MB per second, or 160 megabits per second, so it's likely to be faster than your network, but not nearly as fast as an internal drive. And it's surprisingly quiet; the drive is insulated with little rubberish pads between the drive and the case.

I really disliked the "special" case, which is the only one in which it's available. It is transparent, so you can see the fairly low quality construction of the enclosure, which unfortunately doesn't seem to be removable or reusable with another drive in the future. But the worst part of the case is the rather bright glowing LEDs, which are filtered and run through light sticks to emanate a ghostly pink and lavendar that nearly lights up a room at night. This competes with the standard green and red LCDs on the front of the case, to make the whole thing look a little less than inconspicuos.

There's no power switch, so at least with Windows, the drive must be "ejected" before being removed, as explained in the manual. Otherwise, there's a risk of losing any buffered data and causing Windows to send you a bunch of snippy messages about external drives being removed.

I have had four of these drives for nearly a year. They are quiet and give off little heat. When initially connected via firewire or USB 2.0, Windows XP recognizes them without difficulty, which is not something I can say for other brands I have used. When connected via firewire, they can be chained together since two firewire ports are provided on the back of each unit. There is no on/off switch, which may be inconvenient if you expect to shut down a drive frequently. The neon lights are fairly subdued, even in near darkness. Personally, I think they look good, but that is not the kind of feature I would base a purchase decision on anyway.

I bought this drive in August of 2004, never had a single problem.
PROS: Very fast data transfer, hi-tech looking, real plug-N-play, very quiet.
CONS: This drive does get warm to the touch, no power switch on the drive.

I will be buying another WD external drive in the next few days.

I have always had good experiences with WD drives, so when I needed an external "backup" drive, I purchased this one(purchased 11/03). Over the next 3-4 months I would backup my data to the drive. Each time, I would power up the drive, copy my data, when completed I would ask Windows to disconnect the drive, then I would power it down. Recently (5/04, 6-months later) I needed to restore my data from this drive, after many loud clanking sounds, the drive now cannot copy any of the data from the drive. This drive was not disturbed, jarred, dropped etc. In fact, it has not moved at all since I installed it and it had less than 10 hours of total uptime on it. I am very disappointed in this product from WD.

I now face the decision: do I spend $$$ to recover the data and have the warrenty voided, or do I just "let it go" and get a replacement drive and hope this doesn't happen again.

A little slow but very reliable. Could use a stand so it can be used upright but a lot of drive for the money.

I've had no problems whatsoever with this drive, nor with the two 120 Gb Special Edition Western Digital internal drives in my computer. This 250 Gb drive is great for backing up the two internal drives (though I'm a long way from filling them up), then carrying elsewhere to store away from the computer. And the colored lights in the case do make this drive look really cool.

I got this drive for back-ups about a year and a half ago and now the drive is starting to fail. It creates weird duplicate folders, says things are copied over but are not there. I had issues mounting it on my Mac that I just repalced and at the time I blamed my eMac but now I think it was the drive itself.

I just replaced it with a more reliable LaCie 2D extreme and crossing my fingers that the LaCie will be a more solidly reliable drive.

I bought the hard drive to keep my home video. I have it for over two months now. So far I have no problem with it. I downloaded video files from Mini-DV and edit it into movies and save into DVD. I would like to keep all my video in hard disk,as well as in DVD. I would get another one when this one is full. Next one may be 1 TB.

Bought this one 3 months ago and haven't run into any problems. Although only running with USB1.1 on my P4 1.6Ghz IBM T-30 with WinXP, the speed is totally acceptable for my monthly backups and media storage.

The clear box and neon lights make my small workplace look more contemporary. Definite worth the money!

This drive worked beutifully in the first 8 months in on of our school research laboratories, regardless of the infrequent unexplained miscommunication with the PC. After they trusted it for work and research data backup, done just once every 2 weeks, it suddenly gave clicking sounds and stopped working. After extended agony with the customer support, they simply got nothing. Surperisingly, when they talked about this subject with some of our collegues in our University, they discovered that many of us, 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, 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 before.