Customer Reviews about Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 1.5TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive

Glad I got this. Had one or two probs with the software but once its going its good. You dont have to use the software but I got it to back up my pc because vista keeps crashing and I'm not knowledgable enough to fix the prob without a full system reset. helps me save time and effort and stops me losin stuff. Looks nice too! -- Usb drive

When I bought this drive like so many others have said the sockets on the back didn't align properly, I decided to see if I could gently prise the case off and refit it properly. It was very simple to take off and I noted that the drive inside is a WD Caviar green and at the time the drive alone was only £3 less than the external, so essentially you get the case and power supply etc for only £3, not bad. The case fitted back securely and the sockets were in perfect alignment.

I bought this drive as a media player with my WD TV Live and it is very quick for the purpose and the included software on the first partition automatically detects when the TV live is turned on or off and starts/stops very fast. After six months use it stoped working, the drive had become corrupted. It may have been partly my own fault because I turned off the power without giving it time (30 secs) to slow down and stop. I plugged it into my PC and my PC wanted to format it... I didn't want to do that as I would have lost all my films etc. I had a look at it in the drive management and it showed as a RAW drive. Having been computer savy for nearly 30 years I have encountered this before and knew what to do. I downloaded a free program from the internet to recover lost files, it took 3 days as I had to set a destination directory on another external USB drive, but I was able to recover every file intact. I then reformatted the drive and put my films back on it; it is working fine again.

To the other users who have thrown it away, the drive can always be recovered unless it is physically badly damaged which could cause the platters inside to get displaced and the heads to jam, which in normal use will never happen. Even then if this happens and you have precious data such as home movies which are irreplaceable, there are companies that can retrieve it.

To sum up, it is a good drive for the money, Western Digital are in my opinion the best drive manufacturer and I have eight of their drives and will still buy more in the future. The reason I give this 3 stars is because it did fail and the sockets not being aligned with the case.
-- WD My Book Essential 1TB USB 2

Plug it in and you have about 1.8TB of extra capacity and an easy to use back up manager. Not much else to say. Oh yes, and it's black. -- External hard drive

I purchased this external drive as I wanted to expand my laptop's capacity, so this seemed like the best one at the time from reading a bunch of mixed reviews.

I had no problems installing the product, the correct plug was supplied along with a continental adapter that just slots on to the transformer plug and converts easily from 3-pins down to 2-pins.

The drive installs a virtual drive which is part of the units software. I found it best to contact Western Digital in Holland and they were very helpfull. The guy showed me how to uninstall the back-up software and the virtual drive. Within 2 minutes after following his instructions, it was off the system and I had a complete 930GB of storage all to myself.

The drive itself is small in size, probably the size of an average paperback book. It runs quietly and has blue lights on the front. The drive only really starts up when you need it to and stays quiet all other times. File transfer is quick and loads in no time at all. i'm mainly using the drive for music, photos and Word documents. It's perfectly priced and suitable for most home and office needs.

I'm not quite sure why there are so many negative reviews about this product, for me so far it works well and performs well. I'm only using Windows XP Service Pack 2 and it seems to like it.

No doubt I shall place an order for a 2nd unit soon. -- Fab 1TB drive

The software instead of comming inside the main HD partition, it comes in a "Virtual CD",a hidden partition that eats about 150mb from the HD. I had one already (1tb usb from WD) and the software came inside the only partition and all I had to do was format it (since I had to format to NTFS anyway). This one tho already came in NTFS format.
So other than that, it would be 5 stars.
My 1st one is about 3 years old and never gave me any problems at all. Got this new one only coz my other one has no more space available.
I share them between 3 OS's (mac leopard / win 7 64 / linux) and they work like a charm
The transfer rate between them is around 10-15 mb/s.
The power cord came with an adaptor for EU 3 pin and EU 2 pin, which is very handy.
Would buy a 3rd if needed =) -- not 5 stars only coz...