Western Digital My Book Essential 3 TB USB 3.0/2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive

This applies to the My Book USB3 2TB drive.

First the good stuff -
It is a nice fast drive. HDTune showed and average speed around 90-100MB/s when connected to a USB3 port on my Lenovo W510 laptop. That is why I bought the thing, and it works well. I had NO trouble accessing the drive (but then I reformatted it completely and did not see any issues with the CD partition etc..).

Note: I needed to update the USB3 drivers on my W510 to get it to be recognized consistently by Windows 7. That is likely an issue with the Win7 NEC USB3 drivers preinstalled on my Lenovo, and nothing to do with the WD drive.

Now the awful part:
After about 4 months of usage, the USB3 female connector in the cabinet came loose - and was stuck to the USB3 cable when I removed it!

I have owned close to ten different WD external USB drives from ~320GB and up to 2TB drives. I have *never* had any such issue with any previous drive (my only real gripe has been... Read more

There are 2TB drives out there for less money and if all you need is a huge space, you might consider one of those. The value added in this package is the backup software that is bundled with the drive (actually, delivered right on the drive).

WD Smartware is a backup/restore suite that, once installed, boots with your machine. If the MyBook is attached via your USB port, it will constantly monitor activity and make backups accordingly in the background in near real time without any action on your part. It also maintains multiple generations of files (you choose how many), so you can go back to, say, three versions ago if you need to recover a spreadsheet or other data file.

You can also use it on multiple computers. Backups are stored under folders with the same name as the PC they're created on.

I tested on a Win XP Pro laptop and a Win7 laptop and detected no system slowdowns at all. Every now and then the activity light on the drive would... Read more

First, the packaging. Western Digital (WD) does an impressive job of securely packaging this hard drive with a minimal amount of waste. There's no unnecessary plastic or cardboard.

This 2 TB drive has to be plugged into the wall socket as well as powered with a USB cable. One of my major complaints about electronics products are the ridiculously short power cables. This My Book Essential External Hard Drive has an impressively long power cable - which is a plus for any experienced tech user. WD figures the customer is smart enough not to accidentally strangle themselves with a long power cord. So many products I buy have a cord that is so short as to make the item almost unusable. 5 stars to WD for trusting the intelligence of the buyers of their products.

Here are the results I obtained after testing out this drive:

The drive did not have to be formatted before I used it. It worked with my Windows XP-based computer right out of the box.

It... Read more