WD My Book 1TB External Hard Drive Storage USB 3.0 File Backup and Storage

When the drive became unresponsive and started continually clicking whenever powered on, I was fairly disappointed. This disappointment was exaggerated when I contacted Western Digital. Their website design seems very odd, but at least I was able to create RMA. The advance replacement option was selected, which pre-authorized my credit card for twice the amount that I originally paid through Amazon for the drive! But thats OK, since it SHOULDNT come out. However, once I received the replacement I discover theres no return shipping label. Contacting WD, I find out that standard practice is that CUSTOMER PAYS FOR RETURN SHIPPING. So, not only am I exposed to data loss with my new backup drive dying almost immediately, I have to pay extra to have this defective unit replaced. Other drive vendors do not have this practice, and automatically provide return shipping. To WD credit, when I made noise in a new support ticket, they provided a return shipping label. But its kind of ridiculous that I had to do this to begin with. I made a conscious effort here to try moving from Seagate to WD for my home library backup drive, and Im regretting it now. Maybe Ill have to go back...

What can I say about HP and their 2TB 2.0 USB at first I loved it and I have many years of experience with their products. So I jumped the gun and well it was good, however I got a WD 3TB and it blew my mind away. I returned the HP drive which cost more than the WD by a lot. I have not had a problem with this WD unit to date. I have read most of the reviews here both good and bad. I have had the WD since Jan. 2012 and to date has not burped, sizzle, smoke, and the worse sound is a metal clicking sound. Now I say this and if it goes southward I will be very angry. Pound for Pound ease of use, set up and depending on your data you are saving for the initial back-up I would say anything over 100gb is going to take several hours, so dont stop it or use the computer while it is doing this. Also, shut down all applications running before you plug this bad boy in to your USB slot. I only have the 2.0 USB slot, and though it is fast, I have read of people jumping to light speed with the 3.0USB. Finally if you are worried about the price, it really is a no-brainer BUY, BUY, BUY!!!

After reading the reviews, on ([...]) I was skeptical, I prefer Seagate drives. Since the unit will be in a static position as a storage for music on my Squeezbox, the connector issue didnt seem something as a problem. to date (about a month) it has run flawlessly. The one thing that bugs me is the constant flashing light when it is off?.....hmmmm doesnt seem off if the light is working.....not too sure on the power saving issue here! hence 4 stars. (It also seems to take forever to spool down but that may be not be entirely its fault.) Overall it is fairly quiet and seems to do as intended- store stuff for access, in my case .wave and flac files, lots of room, none of the junky compressed files ie mp3 etc. I bought it as a friend said that it worked well (better than some other units both WD and others) with the Squeez, and so far it does. the Squeez likes it, however I have not tried any other drives. cost wise I think it should have been about $20 less than the $81 that I paid however I suppose it is a fair price. Overall I am fairly pleased.(less the darned flashing light! btw if the LED light is constant on it is in use) good luck and hope this helps. RJ

I have owned this hard disk since November 2011 and so far, it is working out great!! I had read all the product reviews and I was wary about how fragile it is( people said it stops working if it drops), so I am being extra super careful with it like I would my baby! People also recommend that you should not use the WD backup software for one reason or another, so the first thing I did was to create folders called back up, and then copy pasted my Documents, Videos and Pictures in these folders to avoid anything going wrong. Anywho, I bought this for back up and movies and it serves its purpose. However, if you are a PlayStation 3 fanatic and you want to play games you have saved on this hard disk, please note that you have to re-format the disk to FAT32 because PS3 doesnt read NTFS. I dont know the politics involved in some of these decisions, so I am just giving free info..................... I use my older smaller WD hard disk 250 GB passport for PS3 games and back up, so I am good to go for the time being. Otherwise, this is my second WD hard disk and I hope it continues working just fine.

I just got this a week ago, so I cannot speak to its durability. I have limited technology experience, so this was recommended to me by a trusted source. I was looking for something that was simple and plug-and-play; this was almost it. It didnt boot up automatically when connected to my Windows 7 Machine. My machine asked what I should do with the autoplay settings. There is software on the drive to tell you what to do, but you have to root around. Included in the box is a how-to to hook the thing up, but there is no indication on how to use the drive to back up you r files. Odd, since that is why I bought the drive. There is a manual, but its a PDF on the drive. I only found it by clicking on the icons that are poorly named; what they are is not obvious or explicitly named. Once I found the software, everything was cake. The problem is that took long enough that I had the thought Forget it and envisioned sending it back. Overall, it takes a couple steps, but its worth is there. It will be even more valuable if my machine decided to die.

I recently purchased from Amazon two of the new 2TB My Book Essential hard drives to expand and upgrade my external file storage, consisting largely of nearly ten years of digital photo files. I have used Western Digital external drives for several years, and have had absolutely no reliability or quality problems with them. One of these two new drives is my fire safe backup, and the other is the on duty storage for all of our past years digital photos. These new drives are very fast and quiet. I would have given these new drives a five star rating, except for two issues, which may be very important for other people to know about. I hope my review will save the readers many hours of frustration, which I went through. The first issue that you may experience is a well known problem (just do an internet search of the problem) which causes your computer to take about TEN TIMES longer than normal to boot up. This is due to a conflict with the BIOS used by some manufacturers. (Both of my computers have the same initials as High Power) One is my one year old laptop, and the other is our two year old desktop, both with all current updates installed. There is some hope that you may be able to avoid this problem by making some changes to your BIOS setup, but such was not the case for me. Talking with technical support people from both Western Digital and computer manufacturers plus an on-site house call by a very experienced local/independent computer specialist confirmed this. So at present the ONLY way we can avoid this problem is to leave the new external drive disconnected until after the computer is all finished with its whole start up process. (I do this by having the power supply for this new hard drive plugged in to a separate switched power strip which I then turn on only after the computer has completed booting up.) -you can do the same thing using the USB cable, if you wish. The second issue is with the Smart Ware software that comes with these new My Book Essential drives. After many hours of working with it, and trying to like it, I finally un-installed it. For many people who do not currently have any type of real-time backup implemented for their system, it may be just fine. But for me, I hated the lack of visibility and lack of easy accessibility of the specific backed up files. And for some people these new on line automatic file back-ups may work, but the transfer rate time factor for a large number of large files is not to my liking. For years I have used a very simple and inexpensive real-time automatic file backup program, which in my opinion is totally user-friendly and user adjustable. (the image that come to my mind is of a little hamster running in his wheel automatically backing up my selected file (and folders)) that I will continue with. (-BTW, they are a USA company (in the state of Utah) with excellent customer support.) So, I am happy using these new external hard drives as generic external storage. As usual, I purchased from Amazon, and their price and delivery was perfect!

I have a home media center PC and have purchased several of these over the last couple years to store movies and tv shows. I always purchase them in pairs so I have one for the media center and one for backup. WD has changed the design slightly on this model compared to the 1TB & 2 TB model My Book. Those models had two blue LED lights on the front that would blink back and forth when data was being accessed. When the drive went into sleep mode the front would go dark and the lights off. This model has one micro white LED that is bright. It flashes when data is being accessed and continues to slowly pulse when the drive is asleep. A little disappointing in the asthtetics area that they changed this as I purchase this drive for looks almost as much as capacity. It also seems to take a bit longer to spin up and be ready when powering it on than the older models. I gave the bundled software 2 stars because it only came preloaded on the hard drive and not backed up on a disc. When I purchase a hard drive I dont feel anything at all should be on it. The first thing I did was format the drive but then I have to find a place to store the bundled software if I wanted to keep it. Otherwise, WD is a very solid product and I will continue to purchase. They cost a bit more than other brands but I feel you are paying for higher quality. USB 3.0 speeds were good. I purchased a seperate USB 3 card for my laptop but it also works fine at USB 2 speeds as well.

I chose this rating because I feel the 3TB ext is doing its job flawlessly. My laptop has a 250GB internal HDD and was 75% filled up with movies. With this bad boy, I was able to transfer all my tv movies and other files to the external. Allowing my laptop to free up space. How often do I use the 3TB ext? At least once a week. I used to transfer tv movies from my laptop to 16GB thumbdrive to watch on my Samsung 40inch 1080p 120hz LED HDTV. Now I can use the 3TB ext. Like: Good price. Transfer rate is fast. Noise level is relatively quiet. Runs smoothly on Windows XP. Dual USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 compatibility. Dislike: Like many other customer reviewers been writing, the 3TB ext isnt sturdy and can easily be tipped over with the slightest touch. I recommend flipping it (or else the stand blocks the cable ports) and placing it on the plastic stand that came with the box. It works perfectly. Recommend to a friend? Yes.

Well, the USB connector on my drive seems solid, but given the other reviewers comments, I am being very careful with it. I am using the drive as a backup device for my desktop, and so far it is quiet, cool and quick. I am running it off a front panel USB 2.0 port and backups are averaging around 25 to 30 MB/s. I am using ShadowProtect 5.0.1 for the backup chores, and it is also recommended... fast and efficient, the backups are even mountable, which I think is GREAT. I am used to external hard drives that are slow and hot -- this one isnt like that at all, and it has tons of room. When I first got it, I copied off all the WD software and used the quick formatter that they provide (on the drive) to reformat to a clean NTFS volume, took just a couple of minutes, not even time for a cup of coffee. Highly recommended! I see the price has gone up since I made my purchase, +20 bucks, but still a bargain for a 4 TB drive... expecially one this good.

I got this drive mostly because of its energy star rating. If it werent for that I would not have bought it due to the many complaints about its USB connectors being easy to break. I like that the drive turns on automatically after a power failure which makes it great for backups. It does have soft power button that will turn the drive off if necessary, and of course it goes into power save mode if its not in use. I dont like the hard drive activity light which is just a white LED buried somewhere deep inside the housing. You can only see it if you look carefully and at the right angle, or if the room is completely dark the inside of the case lights up faintly. Many reviewers complain about getting bad drives, but I see as many or more bad drive reviews of every brand these days - manufacturers just dont seem to care about quality anymore. So I ran both of these drives through at least 16 days of testing using Ubuntu and a spare computer. Unfortunately I dont have any USB 3.0 systems and writing a repeating bit pattern of 0x55 to every byte on the drive followed by reading it back again takes around 55 hours. I let it write and read 0x55 and 0xaa and then aborted the test before it wrote/read 0x00 and 0xff. I started using that drive for backups and tested the second drive, which I let get through all four tests (0x55, 0xaa, 0x00, 0xff), and then I had it do a random write/read test where it writes random data to the drive and then reads back the data it recently wrote. This forces the heads on the drive to move back and forth a lot. The second drive passed all of these tests which took about 10 days total. If you want to test your own drive, first back up the software thats on the drive because these tests will erase the drive. Download any version of Ubuntu (free), burn to CD or USB flash memory, and you can boot your computer from the CD/USB without making any changes to your regular hard drive by choosing to Try Ubuntu. Once booted, open Applications > Accessories > Terminal, and type this command: sudo fdisk -l Find the line that says Disk /dev/___ 3000.6 GB and note what the value of ___ is. In my case, the 3000.6 GB drive was /dev/sdc but yours may be different. Now type the following: badblocks -vw /dev/___ Replace ___ with the correct device name on your system. BE SURE YOU USE THE CORRECT DEVICE NAME SINCE YOU ARE GOING TO COMPLETELY ERASE THAT DEVICE WITH THIS TEST. You can also run badblocks -v /dev/___ which should prevent erasing the drive by re-writing what used to be on the drive as it goes along, but the test will take twice as long. The tests have very little in the way of progress indicators but theyll tell you when they start writing each of the four sets of bytes and when they start reading those bytes. They will also tell you when the whole set of tests is done and if there are any errors. If you want to perform the random data write/read test, run these commands: dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/___ & dd if=/dev/___ of=/dev/null These tests will always erase your hard drive. While the test is running, you will just see a flashing cursor on an empty line. When the test is done, you will see the $ command prompt again. If there are errors, youll see them, but it wont tell you anything on success.