Western Digital My Book Essential 2TB 3.5" External Hard Drive

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pretty standard external harddrive Ithink, the software that came with it is pretty easy to use and understand, I like the lock feature it has

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Your standard drive.The transfer rates are a little to be desired. Write: 15MB/s, read:45MB/s.I've had a odd problem with the power. Sometimes it won't turn off. I've had the OS lock, and the drive will stay on.Pushing the power button did nothing (Yes, i held it in for 10 seconds). Removing the USB did nothing.I had to remove both the power and USB cable before it turned off.

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Don't buy this. This HDD insists on being a CD drive too. Since it wants us to install its backupsoftware from what appears to be an extra cd. Very annoying. The drive is unreliable. Often I need to copy a movie twice to make it work. Switching to internal SATA Big-HDD now, just bought one. Running a chkdsk with

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I bought this drive intending to use it as a shared network drive by connecting it to the USB port of an E3000 router. When first connected to the router's USB port it appeared to be working until I attempted to back-up a few folders and restore data. Folders created through the router were missing and the drive would auto shut-down causing system lock-ups. After several hours of frustration in dealing with Smartware (like disabling auto shut-down, and watching each individual bit limp down the USB cable into it's final resting spot on the drive - it's slowwwww. And yes, it was on a USB2.0 port - the Smartware categorization feature slows things down to a crawl) I called support. They told me not to use this drive connected to a router USB port. It'd be nice if they had put this tip on the box. Would have saved me the trouble of buying, trying, and returning it.

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I have purchased many WD products over the years. I have 3 WD Passports that are great and have no problems. This My Book however is not a good purchase. I moved everything i had over to this drive 1.8TB before i formatted my other drives to change the filesystem on them. After doing so i tried to move everything back onto those drives so i would have a backup of everything on both drives. Within 5 minutes of copying this drive completely died. I have now lost everything. All my kids pictures, home movies, every document i've ever saved, everything that ever mattered to me. 90% of it is irreplacable. DO NOT TRUST THESE DRIVES. Hopefully you will read this and buy a different drive and it will save you from this nightmare i'm going through. BUYER BEWARE!

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i never write reviews for anything. i just buy my stuff and keep my mouth shut. however, on this, i will make an exception. great deal for the price. aside from the stupid software. there is no way to remove it, only hide it. my kid played around with it when it was asking for password. obviously the wrong one got entered and now i'm locked out of it. i call WD and they cant help. but they were so kind to refer me to someone who can. oh and they charge and arm and leg to recover the data. once your locked out, all you can do is reformat the drive. just stupid. all pics of kids, college stuff, everything lost. over a fuc$ing password??!! DO NOT buy this thing.

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I bought this drive last week and so far it has performed beautifully. There was a minor software glitch when installing the drivers but it was negligible. It seems to function quite well. Be wary of bad reviews as they are usually user errors.

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I own a few more of WD's MyBook, I needed to backup information so I bought this drive. The price was right and WD's quality has been proven good so far. After connecting it to the USB port I moved about 1.8TB of files in the drive, and noticed in Windows logs that there were bad sectors reported, also the transfer speed wasn't good it took more than 24Hs to copy the files. I ran an extended test with WD's own software. The test failed and not only that it lost half of the files in the drive. The drive is now a week and a half old and this weekend is going back to the store. I want to believe that I've got a bad one and I will try luck with a new one, I would strongly recommend to extensively test the drive before putting valuable content in it.

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I bought this for the space obviously, it is a decent drive but nothing special about it. Storing data and thats it. I do experience some slowdowns and some downtime when it wakes up..other then that works great

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I purchased this expecting a nice looking "generic" type portable external HD with some added "bells and whistles" (ie. optional) software.What isn't fully disclosed (or perhaps explained) is that this generation of drives are wholly proprietary and modified at the firmware level from traditional "drives in a box".This drive may or may not be for you. For casual Windows/Mac users needing gobs of space, this is a nice drive. However you should consider these three caveats:Firstly:Western Digital's "Smartware" software is embedded in the physical drive's firmware. Forever. You cannot format, remove or modify it. You lose 500MB of drive space to a Virtual CD-Rom, which will detect and populate every time you attach the drive. As the consumer I will always insist on having a choice on such things!Secondly:Being proprietary, the drive and enclosure cannot be separated. In the event of an enclosure failure, you cannot simply pull the drive and expect to recover data by installing in your pc or a generic enclosure. You need another WD enclosure. Thirdly:For me the biggest issue was compatibility among platforms. I often share data between windows laptops and my ubuntu desktops, in which generic USB drives fit the bill perfectly. I could not get the empty space to detect on ubuntu with NTFS enabled (nor would i want to jerry-rig it to do so. It should just work. My other 4 other enclosures do.) Only the Smart ware CD will detect and mount.The bottom line - if you just need to use it on a windows box, go for it.