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

Does a great job backing up, using Acronis.

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 got this drive the 3TB version for $129 which was a great deal. Performance over USB 3.0 easily beats the speed of the internal drive on my Asus Netbook that I also use as a media center. Size footprint is fine for me and the case looks great and has a simple white LED instead of some ultra bright blue. Pros- Large and fast 3TB drive that is barely audible. Cons- WD software likes to constantly inventory to the point it can create more IO requests than Windows 7 kernel. Can cripple the performance of slower machines. Last I checked there was no option in the software to stop the WD software from doing this. No big deal except the software is needed to set the drive to not go to sleep. Other thoughts, since the disaster in Japan HDD prices have started to climb and will continue for quite some time. Now isnt the best time to buy any HDD and hopefully soon the prices will fall back to where they were.

This is my second my book. The first one I bought was on Black Friday two years ago. I thought that my first one was going bad so i decided to upgrade the this 2tb which is .5tb more than my first My Book. Turned out that my original my book only needed a new power cord and now it works good as new. These are great external HDs! I am a firm believer in WD products. I also own a WD passport 750gig for on the go and to watch movies on my WD TV live media player. the price i got on My Book was great and well worth it. I have more than enough disk space to fit my entire collection of music, movies, e-books, and files. The My Book is very compatible with windows 7. I just plugged it in and started adding files to the drive. I didnt bother with the software that comes with it. I deleted all that crap because to me its just taking up space. Since the drives will always be in my home or in my possession I am not to worried about making a password to access the files. I think I tried the password thing before and it ended messing things up. Now i just keep it simple because there is less chance for error. overall its an awesome external hard drive in both the 1.5tb and 2.0tb.

Im using it as extra storage and backup for my triple-boot tower. It runs better in Linux than in Windows 7 IMHO, I plug it into a USB 2.0 slot and Ubuntu/Mint picks it right up. The backup mounts and saves to it with no problems. I only have USB 2.0 so Ill probably never get the full potential out of it. From what Ive seen it does slow down my system a bit when Im transporting files or trying to watch a video file from the drive. Its by no means a portable drive, so those who want to hook it up to a laptop may want to look elsewhere. This black brick is pretty much for back ups and extra storage on a sedentary PC. In case yall are curious as to what rig Ive hitched this drive to: MSI K9a2 Platinum, Athlon X2 6400+ BE w/ 4GB of PC8500 RAM.

I had trouble and problems getting this drive working. It seemed to install fine, though it took several minutes for Windows to install the correct drivers, but it still didnt show up or appear in My Computer, though it was visible in Add Devices and Disk Management. In trying to troubleshoot it, googling had me at a loss and I started to think it was a bad driver, so I got lost down that rabbit hole for awhile, but I was mistaken. I finally resorted to calling WD Tech Support who were actually quite helpful. They didnt dink around and zeroed in on what is apparently a common problem for Windows 7 : drive letter collision. Im listing it here since I didnt find this solution on my own so maybe it will help someone else. Click Start. Right click Computer in the right column. Click Manage. This should open your Computer Management window. On the left, you should see Storage, and under it: Disk Management. Click this. (If you cant see Disk Management, click the arrow next to Storage to expand it.) After a second it should display at the bottom all your drives, probably Disk O, Disk 1, and CD-ROM 0, or something similar. One of these, probably Disk 1, should say Basic Online, and the drive size: 931.48 GB for the 1TB drive. This is your WD drive. Under the blue bar is should say the size again, NTFS, and Healthy (Primary Partition) Right click on the blue bar for this drive. Click on Change Drive Letter and Paths... In the next window, click the Add button. In the next window, the top radio button for Assign the following drive letter: should be selected. On the right, click the dropdown and select a letter for your drive which you are sure is not in use elsewhere in your system. M is a good bet. Then click OK. Under the blue bar, the drive should now be properly identified as My Book and in My Computer it should appear properly. You should now be good to go.

I absolutely love Western Digital products. They perform well, last forever, and are a fair price. (Usually. . .) This drive met or exceeded all of my expectations in every way except one: that stupid looking USB socket / plug. Really, I do love this drive. And as the tech go-to guy for all my friends, I would recommend it to anyone. You just need to be careful with the connection on the back. It is fragile. Do not bend it or drop it onto the connector. And be careful when inserting and removing the USB plug from the back of the hdd. I did not get a chance to actually test the read write speeds, but I did copy 200 MB onto the hdd and it was faster than I expected. (If I get a chance I will run a simple random access test and post the results.) Overall, I would definitely recommend this hdd to anyone who is looking for a large storage solution.

Ive been using these for years. If you have Windows: -Plug power adapter into Hard drive, -Plug USB cable in, -DO NOTHING: You will get a message saying it did not install correctly, -IGNORE WARNING: It doesnt matter. Go to My Computer and the drive will be there, -Copy and/or Cut and Paste your data If this does not work for you, you are doing something different than I have on four different Windows computers/laptops. I have the 2TB self-powered, 3TB cloud, and many other WD drives and they ALL INSTALL THIS EASY. If you are reading about a failed install; beats me, but the above has worked. Every time. Every Windows OS. Ever tower and or laptop. 4TB sounds like a lot, its not. Back up your data. We assume our computers wont die and take the data with them. Happens every day. Back Up! Daily if important! Buy two and be redundantly redundant! WD is my Go To for storing data for a DECADE. Trust it. USB 3.0 is FAST!!! Its great transferring large files in minutes instead of hours. This is USB 2.0 Compatible. BUT, It wont get super fast unless drive AND USB PORT are BOTH USB 3.0 Either way its a lot of memory for not a lot of money. I already am using two of the 4TB drives.

I only have USB 2.0 so I cant test how it works with 3.0. But with 2.0, it works the same as any of the 50 or so other USB external hard drives I have. I use my own backup software so I cant comment on any included software. So far, it has been reliable but since I only use it maybe once a week to once a month and the rest of the time it sits in a safe, its not getting any hard use. Edit: Ive been using this drive for a while now and finally bought this USB 3.0 Express Card for my laptop:

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!!!