WD My Book 1TB External Hard Drive Storage USB 3.0 File Backup and Storage

What can I say about HP and their 2TB 2.0 USB at first I loved it and I have many years of experience with their products. So I jumped the gun and well it was good, however I got a WD 3TB and it blew my mind away. I returned the HP drive which cost more than the WD by a lot. I have not had a problem with this WD unit to date. I have read most of the reviews here both good and bad. I have had the WD since Jan. 2012 and to date has not burped, sizzle, smoke, and the worse sound is a metal clicking sound. Now I say this and if it goes southward I will be very angry. Pound for Pound ease of use, set up and depending on your data you are saving for the initial back-up I would say anything over 100gb is going to take several hours, so dont stop it or use the computer while it is doing this. Also, shut down all applications running before you plug this bad boy in to your USB slot. I only have the 2.0 USB slot, and though it is fast, I have read of people jumping to light speed with the 3.0USB. Finally if you are worried about the price, it really is a no-brainer BUY, BUY, BUY!!!

The newest one, purchased recently, works fine with no issues except for the fact that my iMac would not recognize both the old and the new identical 3tb drives at the same time. I contacted support via email and they were most helpful, instructing me to change the name of the older one and that took care of the problem. My older one (perhaps a year old) has always worked fine with one nagging issue - whenever I reboot, it goes offline (disappears in Finder and Disk Utility). Whether its dismounting or ejecting, I dont know, but after rebooting I simply have to unplug it and plug it back in and then all is fine. A minor inconvenience - I have to do it every time I reboot. I have installed the latest firmware but that made no difference. I contacted support by email in connection with the above renaming issue and while they fixed that, they never responded to the dismounting problem. Still, Im reasonably satisfied with the products for the price. And I notice that Western Digitals support department has actually responded to some of the complaints in these reviews - I have never seen that by any manufacturers of any products, and I feel they are to be commended for that! Overall, Im giving my two drives an average rating of four stars.

I just got this a week ago, so I cannot speak to its durability. I have limited technology experience, so this was recommended to me by a trusted source. I was looking for something that was simple and plug-and-play; this was almost it. It didnt boot up automatically when connected to my Windows 7 Machine. My machine asked what I should do with the autoplay settings. There is software on the drive to tell you what to do, but you have to root around. Included in the box is a how-to to hook the thing up, but there is no indication on how to use the drive to back up you r files. Odd, since that is why I bought the drive. There is a manual, but its a PDF on the drive. I only found it by clicking on the icons that are poorly named; what they are is not obvious or explicitly named. Once I found the software, everything was cake. The problem is that took long enough that I had the thought Forget it and envisioned sending it back. Overall, it takes a couple steps, but its worth is there. It will be even more valuable if my machine decided to die.

This product gives me all the extra space I need at this moment. I would have given it 4 stars but for a slight inconvenience. It is going to be 3 stars for now, which is still pretty good. Pros: The 3 TB space is huge depending on how much data you need stored. It has more space than my previous 3 hard drives combined. It is compact, and about the same size as my 4 year old WD My Book 640 GB hard drive. With the latest software download either through windows update or western digitals website_[...] copying or storing your data is a breeze. The settings is customizable. It is the quietest hard drive Ive ever bought. It sits steady on my desk and the cable is just about right. So far, I am using a USB 2.0 connection and streams my hd movies flawlessly. If you have USB 3.0 connection, you are set to go. This product is equipped for the future. Cons: When you start your computer, sometimes windows doesnt recognize the hard drive, like it was pointed out in some of the previous reviews. Some said: they do not have this problem with a USB 3.0 connection. Anyway, my quick fix for this little glitch is to click on the start button, click on computer to see all your connected hard drives, then take out the power cord from behind the WD Hard Drive and count up to 10 seconds then plug it back in, and give it another minute or so, to show up on computer (which you already opened). This works for me whenever I have that problem, hopefully, western digital will release a software update to fix this problem. Overall, you cannot go wrong for the price and amount of space youre getting. I paid about $144.00 for this item on Amazon, love it !!

I absolutely love Western Digital products. They perform well, last forever, and are a fair price. (Usually. . .) This drive met or exceeded all of my expectations in every way except one: that stupid looking USB socket / plug. Really, I do love this drive. And as the tech go-to guy for all my friends, I would recommend it to anyone. You just need to be careful with the connection on the back. It is fragile. Do not bend it or drop it onto the connector. And be careful when inserting and removing the USB plug from the back of the hdd. I did not get a chance to actually test the read write speeds, but I did copy 200 MB onto the hdd and it was faster than I expected. (If I get a chance I will run a simple random access test and post the results.) Overall, I would definitely recommend this hdd to anyone who is looking for a large storage solution.

This is my third Western Digital external HDD. I have the two terabyte version and the 2 terabyte network cloud drive and Ive had none of the problems listed is some of these reviews. The cloud drive has been running continuously for almost a year and the 2 TB My Book drive for over 6 months. I do not move these drives around. I run a small home business and my storage needs continue to grow and these thiings fit the bill perfectly. NOTE: I have installed a USB 3.0 card in my HP machine and I have used Device Manager in Win 7 Pro to make the drives have better performance (under policies in the drive properties). I do not know how to do benchmarks but I can state that by switching that checkbox these drives perform almost as well as my internal drives. The 3 TB drive installed in seconds and was ready to use. I highly recommend these drives if you need additional storage and have no more room in you computer case. I do suggest that you install a 3.0 USB card if your computer lacks one.

I am a compulsive media hoarder and have been running out of space for my digital library. I also wanted something portable to take on road trips or when visiting friends and family. I bought a 1TB MyBook back in the day and it was everything I needed so I picked up this 3TB since the price was excellent for the amount of storage. Ive moved over just about everything I have over to this drive and it is extremely satisfying to see how little a dent that has actually made in its total capacity. Also the speed of the data transfer is pretty impressive for a traditional hard drive, I managed to get everything on it much faster than I had anticipated. The only problem I have with the device is that the small light on it blinks when I have it hooked to my computer and put it to sleep. Im usually do this when I go to bed so its a bit distracting. Easily solved by unplugging the USB or turning the drive off, just seems like an unnecessary step.

When the drive became unresponsive and started continually clicking whenever powered on, I was fairly disappointed. This disappointment was exaggerated when I contacted Western Digital. Their website design seems very odd, but at least I was able to create RMA. The advance replacement option was selected, which pre-authorized my credit card for twice the amount that I originally paid through Amazon for the drive! But thats OK, since it SHOULDNT come out. However, once I received the replacement I discover theres no return shipping label. Contacting WD, I find out that standard practice is that CUSTOMER PAYS FOR RETURN SHIPPING. So, not only am I exposed to data loss with my new backup drive dying almost immediately, I have to pay extra to have this defective unit replaced. Other drive vendors do not have this practice, and automatically provide return shipping. To WD credit, when I made noise in a new support ticket, they provided a return shipping label. But its kind of ridiculous that I had to do this to begin with. I made a conscious effort here to try moving from Seagate to WD for my home library backup drive, and Im regretting it now. Maybe Ill have to go back...

Update... I just installed the WD 3.0 USB card I bought here on amazon and transferred 8.9gig in 31 video files in 2min 45seconds to this wd 3TB drive. love the drive with the 3.0 usb. See usb review, it was easy to install. I bought this drive for storage Jan-3-2012. I am running windows 7-64. I have my pc backing up with Genie backup agent on one of my 3 internal hard drives but needed more storage for movies, music, pictures etc. I decided on WD because I have had many drives and WD have always been reliable but I have always bought the Black models. My only concern was as one reviewer stated it is the Green model and is a little slower. Ok now onto the review. As another reviewer stated when I first plugged it in windows said the drive was not installed, but .. it worked fine, I could use windows explorer or xyexployer to view and access the drive. After installing the software it still worked fine until I rebooted. Then the drive was accessible but the software was no longer accessible because it needed to update, so unless I updated the software I would not have been able to access the settings, so I updated both hardware and software. After the install (flash the drive and software) and reboot the computer, the drive appeared empty and to be only 1megabite in size. I rebooted 2 more times same thing and I had copied about 200gig onto the drive before doing the update.... Solution... the drive needed to be unplugged and computer turned off. Then plug in the drive and reboot the computer... everything returned including all the information that was originally copied onto it. Speed. Some reviewers have said the drive is slow or slowed down the computer. Current partial Solution ... I originally plugged the WD drive a usb slot that had another usb flash drive in it. It slowed down the computer and the WD drive was painfully slow. I dont have any speed software but it took 7 min to copy 350meg to it. I have another set of usbs with nothing connected to them and when I plugged the drive into there it worked fine. The computer was no longer slowed down and the WD drive was much faster (2gig transfer in 45seconds), but still not quite as fast as my internal hard drives. I went online and found a WD 3.0 USB card for $29. I have read reviews that this card works great with this drive, win 7 (32 & 64) and increases the consistent speed by 4x with higher bursts under certain conditions. This was not the fastest card I found but it seemed to be the easiest to install and the most compatible with this drive, so I ordered it and will report on the results when I get it.. do to arrive Jan-12-2012. So far I like the drive and software and if the speed is increased with the new 3.0 USB I would say it would go from good drive to great drive and value.

The good Fast, quite, big and affordable. For those that are numbers people out there it took 110 seconds to move 4GB off my internal laptop HD, through my external apple display onto the device. Thats approximately 37 MB/second (or in bus speeds about 298 Mb/sec). Top theoretical speed of USB2.0 is 480 Mb/sec which means this is performing at about 62% of optimal which to me is a great number considering I dont have USB3 ports on my laptop. This was a stop-gap solution for me because I cant afford a full RAID array with enclosure that I like, and this is much much cheaper. If these speeds are acceptable for you, and you can give up the safety of RAID 1 or RAID 5 then this is a great buy. The unit feels very stable, looks great, even the pack-in cables feel very high quality. The bad Pack-in software! Im not one for bundle-ware, but I always give it a shot just to be proven wrong. In this case it was a mixed bag. The Turbo+ drivers that came with it seem to be working great but I dont have much empirical data to back it up, the rest of it was crap. Also, it came formatted as NTFS which is of course read-only on Mac OS X (Im running OSX 10.6.6). I quickly and easily reformatted the device as a single 3TB partition as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) on my own. The ugly The Quick Format utility that came with it was very scary and ugly indeed. It was full of dialog boxes and warnings and a drop down menu with Item 1, Item 2, Item 3 with no indication of what I might be formatting. I quickly ditched that for the default Apple Disk Utility which partitioned/formatted without issue. For those Mac users out there dual booting into Win7 like me there are some free/open source HPFS+ utilities available for Windows so you can still get to your files even though the volume is formatted for Mac. VM Ware and Parallels also provide tools for swapping files back and forth between operating systems if you have those. Summary: 4 stars, pack-in crap-ware cost it 1 star since Im rating the whole shipped product, not just the hard drive.