Ahab1973's Full Review: Western Digital My Book™ Essential Edition™ WD...
Intro - After installing a 160 gig Seagate a while back, I figured I wouldn’t need another hard drive for a while.
Unfortunately, I managed to quickly accumulate about 60 gigs of stuff I wanted to keep. Since I have a bad habit of getting Windows all out of whack every now and then (Don‘t ask me how), I have to do fairly regular reformats. Thus, I knew it was only a matter of time before I was going to screw up the system again and it might cost me all of my data. I've had this happen a couple of times and it's really a pain starting all over and trying to remember where you got everything you lost. Some stuff is simply irreplaceable even if you're willing to hunt for it.
I was pretty much left with two choices. Either start the agonizing process of trying to back all that stuff up to CDs (I don’t have a DVD burner and even that would take forever and a day) or think about getting myself another hard drive. The CD option was out before I even considered it. I already have enough poorly labled (I'm seriously disorganized) CDs laying around and I have no clue what's on most of them.
I stopped in at Circuit City a few weeks ago just to look and see what they had. I’ve been eyeing external hard drives for a while because I figured it would be kind of nice to have the option of portability (although I doubt I’ll need it much). Plus, I had a few problems when I first tried to install the internal Seagate and didn't want to go through that again. I'd heard that most external drives are plug and play.
There were several drives in my price range (I’d decided I wasn’t spending much more than $120 US). There were several internal 160 gig drives, a couple of 160 gig external drives and this Western Digital 250 gig external sitting pretty comfortably at around $150 with tax.
The choice wasn’t too complicated once I realized that I could get almost 100 more gigs for only about $20 more. With hard drives, you can’t really ever have too much space. A couple of the other drives were also made by companies that I've never heard of so I was pretty much sold on the Western Digital. The appearance of the drive was a factor but not really so much. I was mostly looking for the best value and perceived reliability.
Appearance - As the name “My Book” implies, the enclosure resembles a black, medium-sized book that’s designed to sit either vertically or horizontally on a desk or a shelf. It really is pretty attractive compared to some other enclosures I’ve seen. It also has a large, round power button surrounded by a ring that glows green when the power is on and flashes as it’s accessing.
Frankly, I could do without such a large light to indicate the power being on or the fact that the drive is accessing. I initially placed it on my desk about a foot to the right of my monitor. I found the constant glow of the light and the incessant flashing rather annoying so I’m thinking about moving it somewhere where I can’t see it.
Setup - Getting this thing up and running couldn’t be much easier. You simply take it out of the box, connect the power adapter, the USB 2.0 cable (included) and power it up. It shows up as a removable drive on “My Computer”. The only thing I personally had to do was a quick reformat because the factory format was FAT32 and I have XP. I’m not really up to speed on the differences between FAT32 and NTFS but all of the drives I’ve used on this computer have been NTFS. I figured I may as well go ahead and do it before I put all kinds of files on it.
I was kind of disappointed with the fact that there isn’t a single piece of paper documentation in the box. Nor is there a software CD. The “Setup guide” comes in the form of a PDF file that’s located on the drive itself. OK, I realize this is called “The Essential Edition” (A fancy way of saying "bare bones", as far as I can tell) but really. My $20 sound card came with a software CD. Would it have really killed them to give me one with this? The setup PDF gives you all the basics but if you want to know any more than that, you’ll just have to go look it up on Western Digital’s web site.
There is some included software from Google but I’ve chosen not to use it (so far). The drive utilities are my main concern in the software department.
In Use - The drive seems pretty fast. I was able to transfer about 50 gigs of data over to it in about 40 minutes. Again, I’m no computer guru so I couldn’t tell you about access times and so forth. It seems just as fast as my primary Seagate drive.
It’s fairly quiet in operation. When it spins up or down, you will hear it, though. It comes with a small package containing four rubber "feet" with which to decouple it from your desk (or whatever hard surface it may be sitting on). However, I chose to use four sticky-backed felt spacers for this task and found that it really cut down on vibration noise. When it’s accessing, you can hear the classic grinding/chattering hard drive noises. It’s not the quietest drive but it’s not especially loud, either.
A feature I really like is that if you don’t access it for a while, it’ll automatically go into hibernation so you don’t have unnecessary wear and tear from it constantly running. It wakes right back up pretty quickly whenever you go to access the files contained on it.
The enclosure is well ventilated. I placed my hand on it’s top after about an hour of constant writing and felt surprisingly little heat.
Reliability - Well, I haven’t had it very long but if my past experience with Western Digital is any indication, this drive should be pretty reliable. I’ve had two Western Digital internal drives in the past. Both of them worked flawlessly for about 3 years before I sold them or gave them to family members.
Conclusion - All in all, if you need about 250 gigs of additional storage and you don’t want the hassle of installing an internal drive, it’s pretty hard to beat this. It truly is plug and play and I haven’t had the first problem using it. It just……works.
UPDATE March 21 2007 - In the time since I originally wrote this review, I have not had any problems with this drive. It has continued to perform as well as when new and has not developed any unusual noises that I'm aware of (something that has happened with quite a few drives that I've had in the past). It has often simply been left powered up along with the computer overnight so it has quite a few hours on it.
I now feel that I can pretty confidently recommend the Mybook line to people. I have read quite a few negative reviews of Mybooks as well so I guess I would have to recommend people do their homework. External drives are often purchased to be used for backing up critical data so you really need to be able to trust them. If you have important data that you really can't afford to lose, I would suggest making multiple backups on multiple drives if possible. If it's worth enough to you that you'll go to the lengths of buying an external drive in the first place, then the cost of extra drives probably isn't really all that prohibitive.
I'm paranoid about losing my data because it's happened to me a few times (though not specifically because of a HD failure yet) so I have backups on two external drives and have bought a system with a DVD burner and have burned the really critical stuff to DVD as well. It seems like a hassle and it kind of is but you can't really put a price on peace of mind. After several years of personal experience with repeated losses (again, not due to hard drive failures but it doesn't matter how you lost it. The lesson is the same), I would not (and will not again) trust any single hard drive (or any other storage medium) made by anyone with important and irreplaceable data. The price you pay if it fails is just way too high. Multiple backups are essential if your data is really important to you.
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