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

Over the years, Ive owned MANY computers and hard drives and such. Ive been pretty lucky with hard drives, but havent escaped the occasional HD failure. Suffice it to say, I have had my share of hard drive failures. A hard drive failure is ALWAYS annoying and a wake up call to backup data more frequently. I decided that I needed an external drive to backup my primary drive (on my main computer) - since it contains a lot of files that would be pretty hard to replace. Being an I.T. guy myself, I DO keep backups on internet servers. But I wanted something LOCAL (ie: FAST and easy) that would hold my main files AND have a program that would back things up in the background so that Id never have to worry about keeping current backups. You know, when you have a crash, one of the first questions that goes through your mind is: gee, when was the last time I backed up?. I went with Western Digital because Ive had VERY good experiences with their drives. In fact, I dont think that Ive EVER had a WD drive fail on me. (Seagate, yes, Other who knows who build them drives, yes - WD, no). Could be luck of the draw, but hey - if it works, STICK WITH IT. I received this external drive - plugged it in. Windows 7 (64 bit) recognized it right away. Two updates (firmware and software) and I was up and running. The backup software - a GEM. Exactly what I was looking for. It is taking awhile to backup my main HD - but hey - we live in a world where people expect things way too fast. Im a fairly ordinary user, but I DO tend to encode a LOT of videos. This uses up a LOT of hard drive space. The drive is CURRENTLY backing up my main HD (does it in the background, how nice!). I have a little under a terrabyte to backup and it looks like it will finish overnight. Not bad - People tend to dismiss how huge a terrabyte is. Just like the national debt - people dont realize how big a TRILLION is. Example: If you spend one dollar per SECOND - itll take you over 31,700 YEARS to spend ONE trillion dollars. Anyway, I digress - an overnight backup is NOT BAD for an external drive backing up nearly a terrabyte. The software appears to run in the background - it should backup any new or changed files automatically. Bottom line - This drive is working BEAUTIFULLY for my purposes. It is giving me peace of mind. While I dont have long term experience with it, it is working well and if it has the durability of all my older WD drives, Ill be very pleased indeed. One reviewer said it had a flimsy USB3 connector. Im not seeing that. Maybe WD improved the connector with newer models, but mine appears to be a solid, standard, USB3 connector. If I have any issues, I will update this review. I hope my (rather lengthy typing) has been helpful. All in all - Great product. - Ron Donofero *Update* - I had a great deal of trouble with the included backup software. It works great WHEN IT WORKS - but seems to run into problems for unknown reasons (I am an I.T. Tech and did a lot of research to solve the problems - finally gave up). I now use Acronis software to do my backups. I still love the drive, but DO NOT - I repeat - DO NOT use the included smartware software or youll be sorry. I highly recommend this drive married with Acronis - that seems to be an awesome winning combination.

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!!!

Packaged arrived within 3 days, very good shipping. The drive came pre-formatted as NTFS, and contained western digital product related software. I had to wipe it clean as I am using a combination of Linux and Unix systems which caused some trouble due to problems with IO instability (Debian Testing not the fault of this drive). The drive performs excellent in Windows 7 x64, and decent on USB 2.0 on a MacBook Pro (Using Parallels for NTFS drive mounting). Linux USB 3.0 drivers are still lacking, maximum read/write speeds about the same as USB 2.0 (35-50 MB/sec). Windows transfer speeds were outstanding, capping at over 110 MB/sec from a SSD and 90 MB/sec from a network Samba share. Data reads just as fast to the SSD, but not written quite as fast to the network share. In any event, I am extremely pleased with my purchase. Another outstanding product from Western Digital, they know how to do hard drives and its hard to go wrong if you pick their products.

This Western Digital 3 TB External Hard Drive

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

At the time I purchased this 5 yrs ago I thought I got a good deal. It was a good price and I HAVE gotten service out of it for 5 years. The reason I only gave it 2 stars though is because it now has several issues that started at least a couple years ago. It works fine with Vista, Windows 8/8.1 but did something funky when I upgraded from 8 to 8.1 and got strange shortcuts to nonexistent drives like CD Unlocker which Ive just ignored. Now its doing something funny again for no reason seemingly and has changed from my H drive to my I drive. Maybe thats just something I dont understand, no big deal. All this is only present when its plugged in and running and Ive always got access to the drive. Major issue now is it stopped automatically powering back on when I reboot the computer while its plugged in (which is 24/7). I used to just have to unplug the power cord and plug it back in, or do the same via USB connection and all was fine. Now a new problem on top of that has almost killed it. Theres a short at the power plug in the rear of the drive. I have to unplug and plug it in repeatedly, sometimes until my hand gets very tired and just wait and hope it catches and boots up. So far been lucky. Its now obviously on its way out, and I wont be purchasing another one of these. Ive accumulated a lot over the past 5 years and now have to purchase another drive at a time when I cant exactly afford it.

Bought this product as backup mainly of photos. The installation on one USB 3.0 port of my PC was done in a matter of few minutes - a very simple an reliable process, the backup software installation also went smoothly. The drive is very silent, you hear nothing even when files are written on the disc. The file transfer seems very quick. The hard disc case stands securely as shown in the photos, it cant flip easily. Main con I have observed so far is a missing on/off switch (most external hard discs dont have one unfortunately). As other reviewers mentioned, for some reason the WD software only switches this drive to sleep mode (with blinking LED light) when the PC is turned off. You can remove the drive from the USB port with the WD software before you power down the PC, but then the drive is not being recognized when the PC is turned on next time. You need to unplug and plug in again the USB cable to activate the drive in this case. I found a pragmatic and simple solution for this problem: just plugging the power cord of the drive into a cord with on/off switch. Now I can manually turn on the drive when needed and turn it fully off after the PC is turned off. Since many described this problem of not getting the hard disc turned off when the PC shuts down even with older external WD drives, I wonder why the WD software still was not updated in this regard. This cant be so difficult to do! This issue made it loose one star in my rating.

Ive been working with computers since 1974, back when there were no personal or micro-computers. Back when a 300 baud modem was hot stuff. My first 60MB hard drive cost $600 (back when $600 actually meant something) and measured about a foot long or more, about 8 inches high and six inches wide. So you can imagine my delight when this little 2TB drive showed up. Its no more than a tenth of the size of that first 60MB hard drive. Imagine, two thousand gigabytes. Theres an old saying in computing (or at least those old enough to remember it) that, no matter the size of your hard drive, youd only have about 1MB of free space. Well, not no more. Given the performance of our other Western Digital drives, Im pretty confident that the My Book drive will last until, well, until we dont need to preserve our professional, historical files anymore. Now, before I buy things like terabyte drives or printers or laptops, I always check PC Magazines Editors Choice collection, and this one was highly recommended. Its speed, size, and simplicity make it a real standout. Furthermore, weve been using Western Digitals drives for over ten years and have been very pleased with them. Unfortunately, though, Robins Rule #2 is: all drives fail eventually, as do computers. (Robins Rule #1 is: never pass a law you cant enforce, but well skip that one here.) My sturdy old Pentium 4 Micron computer is finally dying, after putting in several years of hard service, so its time to move on to the laptops, especially now that were retired and Im no longer doing interface or other design work that really does need a large monitor. And moving to the laptops means its time to transfer all our historical, professional data off the old machines, which is why I bought the My Book drive. The real beauty of the Western Digital My Book isnt just its thundering capacity, its the size and portability. Using a simple USB cable, I can move my main development data from one computer to the next in less than five minutes (Gee, just like the old days of moving SCSI drives on the Macs). So now every one of our computers with a USB port can become my main development and writing computer. Just as soon as I transfer that 1.5GB of old emails from clients and contact information for everyone I know (I used to use Outlook Express, but now I just let Yahoo take care of the mail), and things like my book-selling database files. The total data transfers have now taken up barely a fraction of the My Books space. Out of a readable 1.81TB, I still have 1.78TB left. And that represents over fifteen years of developing database applications for clients like California state agencies and medical research projects. Meanwhile, the My Book drive just sits quietly in the background, taking up almost no space and storing our entire professional history of database development. Yes, its a ridiculously huge drive for a small company, but all those historical files are critical and, what with the recent tornado warnings (tornadoes in California? Really? Weird.), its nice to know that all I need to do is unplug this one little drive and our critical data is safe. Or, at least, it will be safe just as soon as I finish transferring the data from the other computers sitting around here. Thats an awful lot of reassurance for about $130.

I have this unit since 2011 and its still going strong. It remain invisible, hidden in a corner.. I dont see it, I dont hear it. I just noticed that I havent even removed the plastic film that it came protected in. For most part, external or internal HDDs run forever and one day, just die. There used to be a time when they would go noisy in their last moments but since 1995, most HDDs have outlived the system overall. I dont care about benchmarking the speed. I just need a reliable data storage to hold my 1700 movies and a small redundant backup of my research data. If you need something like that.. I dont see why you shouldnt buy this (price, aesthetics and personal preferences not being a factor). One thing I noticed was that the power adapter it came with, was not branded Western Digital. Its some generic American Power something brand which is weird because Ive had other externally powered HDD from WD and the power adapter clearly had the WD logo on it

external hard drives have become kind of mundane, but some are better than others.... useful hint: if you are technical, theres a free handy drive copy tool called Fastcopy (first hit on Google)... the guy who wrote it does some low level stuff with drive operation to maximize speed and it really works.... I was able to increase this drives throughput on USB2 by about 15% using fastcopy instead of just drag n drop.... back to this product Pro: - WD brand.... Ive had much better luck with WD than Seagate and others the last few years... they are all fragile devices, so dont spike them, but it seems like WD has been more reliable lately - it doesnt force you to use the onboard software which is awesome because Im a techie and dont want to use wizard BS. - has a monolithic supermodern look with no BS which I like - performance is good to great on USB 2.0 at 23MB / sec write, 35MB/ sec read... max possible is about 45MB/s but Ive never seen a 2.0 drive do even close to that ... Ill post 3.0 speeds when I can - it comes with WD SmartWare for windows and mac which is a wizard type management, encryption and continuous backup software.... looks like it can do the job, but I didnt try it.... search gH9Qj57PPgA on youtube to see a demo - no bright leds etc so it doesnt distract next to a TV or wherever... - 3TB size is nice n big - its a 3.5 Sata drive inside, so if you really need to, you can rip it apart and install in a PC in a pinch Con: - its a 3.5 drive so after you get the casing around it and all that, its large and not very portable, in comparison to smaller laptop hard drive based external drives, but they dont make them in 3TB versions yet - uses a new custom USB cable... so dont lose it and expect to pull one out of your spare parts easy.... overall it does the job, is well priced, and didnt force me to use its software... so I like it.... enjoy!