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

I set this up without activating any of the special software, and did not set it up for automatic backups. I prefer to do manual backups, because of concerns that I have about automatic programs. So far, everything is going well. It is a lot of space for not too much money. I say this as someone who got into computer use when 1 GB cost as much as these 3 TB! My two complaints so far are these: (1) the connecting power wire is extremely flimsy and probably will fail if handled much, or bumped the wrong way, and (2) it says that you cannot turn the unit off unless you activate the backup software included with it. Since I chose not to active the software, I guess that I cannot turn it off. That means that I will have to unplug it to take it offline. This is not only inconvenient, but will eventually lead to the connectors failing. I like having it offline between manual (drag and drop) back-ups to keep from having it hacked. Update on 05-08-2013 The 3TB data storage unit is still doing the job well, with no problems, after three months. I leave it on all of the time, although I do manual backups whenever I add or change something on my computer hard drive that I wish to back up. So far, I am still pleased with this product!

I purchased this drive to give me some much-needed extra space, and a way to transfer files from Windows7 to Ubuntu, and back again. It has performed flawlessly and more quickly than expected. Windows Users: Install the driver that comes on the drive. Then Install the software that comes with it only if you plan to use it (I didnt, so Ill not review the software). Then run Windows update to update the driver. Ubuntu users: The drive will work without additional drivers. Leave the drive formatted as NTFS if you intend to use it on other operating systems. Mac Users: I suggest installing an NTFS FUSE driver for read/write access to NTFS partitions before plugging the drive in, otherwise you will have read-only access until you install the included software and reformat the drive as HFS+. HFS+ is a poor choice if you intend using the drive with other operating systems, as they will have read-only access to the drive without significant modification, if indeed they have access at all. Applicable to both: This drive is suitable for any and all external storage needs. No external drive can equal the performance of an internal, but for most uses, this drive is more than adequate. While I would not suggest it as a boot drive, few people would wish to use it as such. be careful when plugging in/removing the cords, as others have had issues with the connectors breaking (personally I believe they were abusing the drive, but cannot be sure, all I know is that this has not happened to me, and I am not overly careful about such things). UPDATE 12Nov2012: This drive continually puts itself to sleep and parks the heads to save power. While this behaviour in no way compromises the drive while reading or writing to it, if you do not use it constantly, it becomes quite annoying waiting for it to spin up and get ready. There is no way to disable this feature. -1 Star for poor design.

I have used several WD external drives, but this is the first one that required an external power source. The others were all passports (which I really like as well) powered by the USB (for laptops on the go). It was extremely easy to setup, and as my first USB 3.0, I love the speed at which it performed my complete backup. The 3.0 speed is really not so necessary after the initial backup unless you frequently store items in excess of .5 GB. It runs nicely in the background, uses minimal system resources, and I like that the included software lets you customize things like how many iterations of each file you want it to keep. I am good about using save as, but it is nice to have that extra added security knowing the odds of an original you modified is still in-tact are high. It automatically recognized multiple machines, and stores each backup separately. I considered wiping the drive of its proprietary back up software and letting windows manage my backups to the drive, but the windows auto backup does not allow for storing multiple versions of the same file, or continuous backup. Great drive, WD would have to mess up pretty big to lose my consumer loyalty.

MARCH 15, 2014 UPDATE: Sitting here this morning and suddenly heard the chiming sound that indicates a USB device connecting/disconnecting. Checked the list of drives, and yup, the My Book was gone. Checked all the connections, rebooted, and all I get is a USB device not recognized message. I also note that the little flashing light inside the unit no longer is flashing. So is it the controller card as another customer discovered? Did the drive itself crash? Is it the fragile power cord? All I know is nine-and-a-half months after I got the replacement for the defective drive, this one has conked out as well. WD, whats going on? ORIGINAL REVIEW: Maybe I should have paid more attention to the number of one-star reviews this thing got. But Ive long been a fan of WD drives, so I just rationalized those away. BAD IDEA. Hooked it up the day after it arrived and it installed flawlessly. Copied some files using the SmartGuard software that comes with it, and all seemed well. Then I noticed an ever-lengthening list of files it had not copied. Shut down and rebooted and the drive no longer was visible. Tried reinstalling and it SAID it was installed and ready to use, but it showed up nowhere. Went into Disk Management where it showed up as Not Initialized. So I tried to initialize it (both MBR and GBT) and got the same error message both times: The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error. Tried it on another laptop and got exactly the same results. Called WD support and the guy had me download and run Western Digital DataLifeguard Diagnostics. Passed all its tests, but Health Status came back as Warning. Second call to WD and the guy told me to take it back to where I got it. I thanked him and asked him to tell WD to start building them like they used to. He said this one is an anomaly, that I just got a bad one. So I asked for a replacement. Am I a fool? Ill report back when I know... OCTOBER 21, 2013 UPDATE: The replacement drive came quickly, installed easily and is still working. I find myself kind of tippy-toeing around it though, never quite trusting it as I do the older WD drives I have (two of which serve as back-ups for this one). Ill report back in a few months on how it holds up over time--it could be worth a couple more stars if it lasts. FEBRUARY 3, 2014 UPDATE: Still running and happily syncing with the contents of two 2TB WD drives. So, adding a couple of stars, and if we make it to a year (and my memory of the initial hassle continues to fade), I might even add another.

I have six of these drives. I have had no serious problems to date, the oldest Ive owned for about four months now. I will return to edit this review should a drive fail in the future. UPDATE: I wrote the above in October 2011. Writing now in October 2012, I now have eight of these drives. No problems to date. SECOND UPDATE: Writing now in November 2013. I have nine of these drives at this point. No problems to date. THIRD UPDATE: Writing now in October 2014. Same nine drives. Still no problems to report. Here is my recommendation for how to set up the drive, out of the box. Ive done this a bunch of times now, so Im getting routine at it, and thought Id write it out for others. Some caveats, for what it might be worth: --I am running Windows 7 64-bit. --I use both 3.0 and 2.0 connectivity, depending on the computer I hook these up to. --I have no use for the included backup software, so I cant speak to that. If you are buying this for the backup software, skip this review, because Im going to be describing how to setup the drive by wiping that stuff off. --I use these drives primary as HD media storage, accessing them directly through USB, or over ethernet, with my Dune Smart D1 media player. --My media player initially had trouble seeing this drive until I figured out the sequence below: Setup: --Out of the box, plug the power in, and then connect the drive to your computer with the provided USB cable. For what we are doing, it makes no difference if you have a 3.0 or 2.0 USB port on your computer, the drive works fine in both. --Your computer will begin to automatically install 3 drivers, and will almost certainly fail to install one of them. This is the SES driver. Dont worry about this at all. We will get to that in the next step. Now, if this is your second (or sixth!) drive that you have purchased, it wont fail on installing that third driver, because youll have done the following steps already, and your computer WILL already have the SES driver installed :) --Take a breath. All you should have done up to now is plug in and sit back. Your computer may have put up an AutoRun message about what to do with the new drive. If so, just close that message box, X it out. The drive should now be showing up on your computer. You could start using it right now, absolutely. But we have some more work to do, in order to have a real clean start with this drive. The manual says that you need to install all the bloatware that comes with this drive in order to get the SES driver on. Happily, this is not true. What you now need to decide is whether you want to bother with the SES driver. If you install it, things will go more smoothly every time you plug it into the computer that has that driver. The computer will recognize the drive right away, and there will be no error messages. If you dont install the SES driver, you will have to put up with the minor irritation of having to sit there a few seconds every time you plug it in and have it re-recognize the two drivers that it will successfully install, and hit the error on the SES driver not being found. For me, this is enough of an irritation that I install the SES driver. But you absolutely do NOT have to, if you dont mind putting up with those few extra seconds on every plug-in. Your call. If you want the SES driver installed, follow the next step. If you dont, skip it and NO harm done. --I dont want to sit there for a slow driver install every time I plug these things in, that is not the way to go for me. So I install the SES driver. BUT, I am not going to put the WD bloatware on my machine. And I dont have to. The SES driver is available as an automatic OPTIONAL download from Windows Update. So you need to launch Windows update from your computer, and you need to re-check for the latest updates, to refresh the list. Now that you have plugged in this new drive, you will find among the OPTIONAL Windows updates an SES driver listed. Install this update in the usual way. I dont think you need a reboot, but then it never hurts. So after downloading and installing the update, remove your new drive from your computer, the usual safe way, by Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media :) Reboot. Now plug your new drive back in again. You should find it is discovered just a bit quicker now, and with no driver error. Great. --Alright, now we need to clean up the drive itself. I want a clean, formatted drive. But I want it done the right way, and these new 3TB drives are an issue. Has to do with the way they allocate chunks of memory. You cant just format them the normal Windows way. Well, you can, but then you are going to end up with less than 3TB for a partition. Not what we want. The good news: WD has just the software to get you formatted right. The bad news: they put the software on the drive itself. Well okay, this is actually good news too, one less CD or DVD to deal with. BUT. I dont want to KEEP that software on my drive, I just want to use it for a sec. It couldnt be simpler. What you need to do is simply copy the files and folders that come shipped on the drive itself onto a temporary folder on your computer. Copy them all. You will only use one, but it relies on some of the others, so copy them all together. Once you have them copied onto the temp folder, go to that temporary folder and double-click the WD Quick Formatter.exe file. Why cant you just run this program from the file that is on the drive itself? You are going to be formatting that drive, and it cant do that and read a file from itself of course. Youll get a cant perform action error, the drive is in use. So you copy the files and folders over, make sure the new hard drive is plugged in, and then run the WD Quick Formatter.exe file from the temp folder. --The formatting process is pretty quick, should take just a minute or two. One key thing: you will be asked: Factory default formatting, or XP compatible formatting. XP compatible is the default choice. For me, I found this screwed things up. This was the reason my media player wasnt recognizing the drive. When formatting factory default, I have had no problems. I would recommend you select this option. Done. You now have a pristine, clean drive, formatted the correct way to take advantage of the 3TB. I would save those files and folders you copied over, by the way. If you ever want to reformat again, it is going to be a hassle without them, and super-easy with them. Keep them on your main computer, tucked away somewhere they wont bother you until your moment of need. If you dont keep them and need to reformat someday, you are going to have to go to the WD website, find and download them. A few more words. The WD Quick Formatter.exe is what you want. It is nowhere mentioned in the manual or the WD website, best I can tell. Bizarre. By all means, you do NOT want to run WD SmartWare.exe. Unless of course you want all that stuff on your computer. Some of the other reviews suggest that there is a hidden partition on this, where the WD software resides. Not so. The drive ships with just one single partition, as the manual claims. Check yourself on Control Panel-->Administrative Tools-->Computer Management-->Storage-->Disk Management. The software sits right there on the drive, in plain site. Four folders and two executable files. The drive is 2.72TB for real, not 3.00TB. No truth in advertising, it turns out. And again, no that missing space is not some hidden partition ;) The reviews about the fragile usb connection, the little tiny one that goes into the drive itself, are correct! It is flimsy, and it wont put up with any jiggling. You cant sit this drive somewhere where it could get brushed up against or moved. The slightest jostle and it loses the connection. Even if for a moment, this kills a large file transfer of course. What a pain. Four stars instead of five because of this. I dont keep them where they can get moved, so not really an issue. But if they were positioned in that sort of way, this would have to be a one star review. Truly lousy connection. Up to you depending on where you will situate the drive whether this is a non-issue or a huge issue.

This is my second my book. The first one I bought was on Black Friday two years ago. I thought that my first one was going bad so i decided to upgrade the this 2tb which is .5tb more than my first My Book. Turned out that my original my book only needed a new power cord and now it works good as new. These are great external HDs! I am a firm believer in WD products. I also own a WD passport 750gig for on the go and to watch movies on my WD TV live media player. the price i got on My Book was great and well worth it. I have more than enough disk space to fit my entire collection of music, movies, e-books, and files. The My Book is very compatible with windows 7. I just plugged it in and started adding files to the drive. I didnt bother with the software that comes with it. I deleted all that crap because to me its just taking up space. Since the drives will always be in my home or in my possession I am not to worried about making a password to access the files. I think I tried the password thing before and it ended messing things up. Now i just keep it simple because there is less chance for error. overall its an awesome external hard drive in both the 1.5tb and 2.0tb.

Great deal and fast delivery on a piece of computer hardware that everyone with mass quantities of data, like myself, could find more space than the average person would ever know what to do with. I maybe should have read a bit more cause I was a little disappointed in myself for purchasing one that requires its own power source via outlets instead of an independent that just plugs usb and is recognized and ready to take on all the data i can throw at it. For 2 tbs i suppose its worth the risk, Im just a generally green individual that tries to avoid that when I can. No issues with the product so far otherwise, its exactly what you expect, although 2tbs is rounded up from 1.82, not really concerned with that missing 100 something i doesnt actually have since 1tb is a chore for people to fill and requires the dedication of a music, video, and computer game junkie to fill and even then you can find space when all those parties have had their turn, you never have too much space for hoarding data thats essentially useless and unnecessary for any average human too have for nothing other than safe keeping the personal collection and never having to replace in man hours from the beginning again when the next eventual computer purchase takes place. Plus I like to rotate an extravagantly large music collection around from laptops original hard drive to a separate storage device as the mood dictates a different selection and can keep it all on one source now instead of trying to remember where i put my collection of flash drives and sorting through them until i find the files im looking for, just a convenience that I expect to last, at least, through a couple laptop upgrades before I need seek an upgrade but it may work the rest of my life and I dont need another hard drive for all my data. Well worth the investment after a weeks worth of use and helpful in sparking a goal for size of collection someone like my self will compete with memory to get everything Im desiring as far as music, movies, tv,series, and games are concerned.

This is for the most part a pretty good hard drive, and Ive loved having it for extra storage on my computer. I havent even filled it up yet despite having lots of videos on it. However, I have two bones to pick. For one thing, this hard drive is a bit big and bulky, even for a 3TB. I realize its a full sized one that plugs into the wall, but they couldve slimmed down the casing considerably and made it much less bulky. Thats more just an asthetic thing though, and I still have plenty of room for it. My other gripe, which is even more annoying, is that it takes forever to load content from it. I have two passport drives that are 1 and 2 terabytes and they load almost instantly. However, this drive every time I bring it up on my computer, takes 30 seconds to a minute or sometimes more to bring up my data. This is aggravating because it happens every time. Whats even more frustrating is when Im watching a video on it and then I have to pause it for a period of say more than 10 minutes. Every time I return to it, I either have to bring up the drive again or wait a minute or so for the video to load again after taking it off pause. Lately I have elected to bring the drive back up in Windows Explorer. The ridiculous thing though is that it still does this even if the drive is already open in Explorer. It should not take this long to load my data! If you dont mind the annoyances Ive pointed out, then this could be a good drive for you packed with lots of space, but if you want access to your data in the blink of an eye, find yourself a better drive or go with a Passport or two.

I had a 2 tb wd essential hard drive as well as a WDTV box and loved it. I decided that i wanted to expand my collection, so i gave my sister my old 2tb wd hard drive and purchased a new 3 tb one for myself(transferring my important files over to the new one before giving over my smaller drive. I spent about 2 days transferring my files and finally plugged in my new 3 tb hard drive into the wdtv box and nothing. It didnt recognize it at all, my computer was able to see all of my files but the wdtv box does NOT recognize anything over 2tb. So, now after several hours of research, I know that I shouldnt have wasted so much time and effort. I just wished someone warned me of this before i made this (semi large purchase). I also tried to partition the hard drive to trick the wdtv into thinking that it was 2 separate hard drives totaling 3 tb, but it doesnt work. Now my only options are to clear out this massive hard drive, purchase a new 2 tb hard drive and refill it again (remember it took 2 days) or purchase a much much more expensive wdtv live player that can accept a hard drive larger than 2 tb. Overall.. please check which wdtv player you have before purchasing any hard drive over 2 tb, it will not accept anything larger I dont have much to say about the hard drive functioning for a computer. It seems to work pretty well, but the usb plug gets a little wacky, it tends to loose the connection when you slightly move my laptop. Its possible that i got a bad cable and thats that, but fair warning overall.

I ordered the 2tb version. I average around 60MB/s. Whereas hooking this same drive via SATA to my PC, I average around 78MB/sec. I was using a usb 3.0 nec pci-e card. I suspect this is a limitation of the usb 3.0 standard, though theoretically it should not be a problem. And to address my biggest issue with this hard drive is that there is no way to turn off the encryption for this hard drive. I thought this to be an option, so I didnt mind ordering this over similarly priced alternatives. This bothers me because if for whatever reason you remove the drive from the case to install directly into a computer, you will not have any access to the stored data. You will be prompted by your computer to initialize, which will pretty much guarantee recovery will be impossible. In my case, I did not have a usb 3.0 card at the time, and the 2.0 speeds were ridiculously slow. So I removed the drive and hooked it up directly to my computer via SATA in hopes to transfer >1tb data much faster than usb 2.0 speeds. However, I had zero access to my hard drive when installed directly to the motherboard. Computer would not recognize the drive. If I initialize when prompted I would be able to use the drive in Windows just fine. BUT when I put the drive back into the external enclosure, the computer would no longer recognize it again, because the hardware controller is decrypting data that is already not encrypted, so its just scrambling the data up. This was before I installed the wd software. So I installed the software hoping I could disable it. Lo and behold, it was already disabled. So whats the point of enabling it? You can set a password to the drive to access it. Buyer Beware! edit 12/13/13: Just saw the many thumbs down on my review. :( The point I was trying to make, was that if the enclosure breaks for whatever reaason, ie the usb port or power port breaks, then unless you can fix these problems (ie. resolder a new port on a circuit board), there will be no way to recover the data on your hard drive without paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars to a professional. You would normally be able to remove the hard drive from the enclosure and buy a new generic enclosure (or even use a same brand/model enclosure) or hook up the hard drive directly to the computer to access the files. HOWEVER, all data using the stock enclosure is automatically hardware encrypted, whether you set a security password or not! And the encryption is unique to each device, meaning simply buying a new model and switching out the hard drives will not work. Your computer will not be able to access any files on the hard drive at all, and will insist on formatting the drive to something it can recognize (making professional recovery even harder). You can search the reviews for encryption, and you will see that people have already ran into this problem.