Western Digital 500 GB My Book Essential 2.0 - USB 2.0 External Hard Drive WDH1U5000N

I bought this hard drive for primary backup purposes....DON'T DO THIS!!! I had the drive for little over a month when I started experiencing communication problems with my computer. A little more than a month later, it took a fall of little more than a foot onto a carpeted floor and croaked. I lost over 100GB of priceless data I can never get back all for this piece of garbage. I am very disappointed with the quality and don't plan on buying anything from this company ever again.

I have an older version of this product (USB/FireWire) that just died -- again -- for the fourth time. WD has dutifully replaced each failed drive with another, which then proceeded to fail after some weeks or months. This one lasted long enough to get past the 90 day warrenty extension it comes with. I was never able to use this drive in any of its four incarnations for the backup application I bought it for. My guess is that the drive is OK, but the interface electronics has gone bad, because it works for about a minute after I let it cool down for a few hours. I will probably remove the drive from its case and try putting inside of one of my computers. It may be that WD has come up with a fix, but I'm not taking any chances on My Book until I hear some good news about a re-design

my son is very happy with his western digital 500gb by book external hard drive. it came alot faster then we had thought it might and seems to work great.

I bought this hard drive after reading a number of reviews that said it took a while to set up. For me, setup couldn't have been easier-- just plug it into your computer and it's ready to go. The one thing I wish it included was instructions on the best way to reformat the HD from FAT32 to NTFS. I used a Windows Vista program to do this, and it took several hours. Quick Format would have taken minutes and given me the results I wanted. But other than that, there's nothing I'd change or improve about this hard drive. Also, the price on Amazon is lower than many other web sites.

I needed to get photos off of my laptop since I take many photographs of birds so I purchased this drive for the price and size.

Compared to one of my colleagues this drive is much faster not only for my computer to acknowledge it but also transferring full size 8 MP files to it at about 2 images per second. I am sure there are drives that can do it faster but I was plenty happy.

The main negative thing I can say was that out of the box there was only 465 GB available. I realize there is software on it but 35 Gigs worth? I deleted some pdf files that weren't necessary but that did little for me. In all reality I probably will not fill up the drive anytime soon so what am I really worried about. The 3,000 photos I transferred only took about 10 GB.