Western Digital My Book™ Essential Edition™ WDG1U2500N 250 GB USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Pros: A good price, a good looking unit, and a good performing hard drive.
Cons: Doesn't have firewire connectivity, thus daisy-chaining is out of the question.

Introduction: Only in recent days, I have received my Dell Dimension 4600 computer from my time living around the South Bend, Indiana area. I did a lot of music with my Nephew, and that filled up my 80 gigabyte drive in a serious hurry. I was ...

Pros: Simplicity personified, relatively attractive, small, inexpensive.
Cons: That light ring is annoying! No software CD. No paper manual. Slightly noisy.

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 ...

Pros: Small, capable, inexpensive, easy to install and use.
Cons: Weak and confusing installation instructions.

I've had an 80 GB external drive for several years, and I've used it for (somewhat irregular) backups of My Documents. It's not big enough any more, so I looked around for a larger alternative. Buy.com had this 250 GB drive on sale for under $100, and ...

Pros: size, price, ease of use
Cons: user manual on board not paper

i bought one of these last year as i needed extra space to store all my stuff on.

i have found that it is one of the easiest hard drives i have used, i was disappointed that the user manual was on board and not a paper one but it did not take long to figure it out anyway.

its easy to install and copy stuff over to.

i would definitely buy another one next time i need more space.

Pros: Um....everything???!!!!!!
Cons: Can't really think of any...I LOVE the cool green power ring!

I find it amusing that a common complaint has been the lack of documentation or instructions that accompany this hd but there's a reason for it....YOU DON'T NEED ANY!!! :)

This hd is literally plug and play...I am a dj and have been using it for 3 months now with nary a blip. It's fast, easy to set up and the fact that it comes pre-formatted FAT 32 is exactly what I needed.

It even fell off the table once when I was breaking down after an event and still works perfectly! (knock on wood)

I would definitely recommend this hd and I will be picking up another one very soon!

Pros: Served me well(and my pocket) for 9 months
Cons: a little noisy and slow

Hi How are you?
Got this 9 months back and has been doing very well. I have used its capacity to about 60% without any complaints from the disk.Takes a little while to show up on the my computer icon list of peripherals after turning on.The size is a little too big to fit in with every thing in the laptop bag so portability is not 100% convenient.Is a little noisy too but does not wake up my wife while she is sleeping besides me.File transfer in and out is just a little slower than the laptops own disk.

Pros: nice concept, convenient
Cons: defective product

I have been a fan of Western Digital hard drives for many years, but that ended with this product. I purchased an Essential Edition 250GB drive for my daughter as a Christmas gift, by New Years it was DOA. Giving WD the benefit of the doubt, I exchanged it for an identical replacement. This one made it until early March. Three clicks and it turns off. WD says there is nothing I can do but return it under a RMA. They can do nothing about the lost data. So much for using this drive for backing up important files. I've have had at least a dozen WD drives over the years and never had a failure, they just became obsolete because of their size. This produce however....STAY AWAY!

Pros: nice price.
Cons: faulty product.
accident waiting to happen.

this is terrible product. i bought and used it for just past the warranty period. the unit made noises at the end. i lost all of my wedding photos and important documents. the company was willing to do absolutely nothing about retrieving my stuff. if i can save just one person from facing lost precious photos; so be it.

Pros: Seems to be well-built hardware Lot's of storage for the $$
Cons: Very poor support website Very poor manual

Wanted an external Hard Drive after brother's recent experience with corrupted files saved by his external Hard Drive backup. Saw this unit on sale at Best Buy for $90, thought lot of storage for that price, so purchased. The floor sales guy seemed way too positive when I asked him about the unit, by the way. The instruction pamphlet was very poor, instructing you to the Western Digital website for drivers, yet nothing found there after searching various ways for 10 minutes. So I thought, just plug it in and try, and it prompted me to load Google desktop, another Google program, and then the Adobe Acrobat reader in order to read the manual. When I cancelled the Acrobat install (already have latest edition), the process froze. I unplugged the USB, shut down the installation screen, then plugged the USB back in again. This time there was no activity, so I manually accessed the drive using Windows Explorer. This time was able to open the (same poor) pamphlet/manual on the hard drive that was in the box.