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

I have owned this hard disk since November 2011 and so far, it is working out great!! I had read all the product reviews and I was wary about how fragile it is( people said it stops working if it drops), so I am being extra super careful with it like I would my baby! People also recommend that you should not use the WD backup software for one reason or another, so the first thing I did was to create folders called back up, and then copy pasted my Documents, Videos and Pictures in these folders to avoid anything going wrong. Anywho, I bought this for back up and movies and it serves its purpose. However, if you are a PlayStation 3 fanatic and you want to play games you have saved on this hard disk, please note that you have to re-format the disk to FAT32 because PS3 doesnt read NTFS. I dont know the politics involved in some of these decisions, so I am just giving free info..................... I use my older smaller WD hard disk 250 GB passport for PS3 games and back up, so I am good to go for the time being. Otherwise, this is my second WD hard disk and I hope it continues working just fine.

I have 2 of these drives. Theyre dependable so far in that Ive experienced no problems with any data loss. Theyre plug and play and I use them as stand alone externals for back up. I dont unplug them and move them around which is why I bought 2 of them. One is running on an HP XP and the other on a Sony Vaio 64 bit Windows 7 desktop. My only complaint with this drive is that its slow to wake up. If I want to copy a file, when I drag it to the WD Drive, I oftentimes get a not responding message and then a few seconds later it copies ok. If I double click to open the drive to copy something into a folder, it takes about 10 seconds for the drive to wake up before I can copy to it. Other than that, the drive is fine and at a good price, its perfect for backups.

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...

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.

I had trouble and problems getting this drive working. It seemed to install fine, though it took several minutes for Windows to install the correct drivers, but it still didnt show up or appear in My Computer, though it was visible in Add Devices and Disk Management. In trying to troubleshoot it, googling had me at a loss and I started to think it was a bad driver, so I got lost down that rabbit hole for awhile, but I was mistaken. I finally resorted to calling WD Tech Support who were actually quite helpful. They didnt dink around and zeroed in on what is apparently a common problem for Windows 7 : drive letter collision. Im listing it here since I didnt find this solution on my own so maybe it will help someone else. Click Start. Right click Computer in the right column. Click Manage. This should open your Computer Management window. On the left, you should see Storage, and under it: Disk Management. Click this. (If you cant see Disk Management, click the arrow next to Storage to expand it.) After a second it should display at the bottom all your drives, probably Disk O, Disk 1, and CD-ROM 0, or something similar. One of these, probably Disk 1, should say Basic Online, and the drive size: 931.48 GB for the 1TB drive. This is your WD drive. Under the blue bar is should say the size again, NTFS, and Healthy (Primary Partition) Right click on the blue bar for this drive. Click on Change Drive Letter and Paths... In the next window, click the Add button. In the next window, the top radio button for Assign the following drive letter: should be selected. On the right, click the dropdown and select a letter for your drive which you are sure is not in use elsewhere in your system. M is a good bet. Then click OK. Under the blue bar, the drive should now be properly identified as My Book and in My Computer it should appear properly. You should now be good to go.

I recently lost my computer and I last backed up my files a year ago. So I only lost a year of information. Not any more! Small and stylish. Easy to use software that allowed me to back up 3 of my computers. The only down side is that My desktop computer has 2 ports with a 500GB and 2TB external drive. When My Book is on it will monitor the other external drives and not let me undock the drive when needed. I have to shut off My Book then turn it back on after I release the other external drive. I still like My Book better than my other external drives for back up because it automatically backs up files when added or changed. My other external drives only work manually.

external hard drives have become kind of mundane, but some are better than others.... useful hint: if you are technical, theres a free handy drive copy tool called Fastcopy (first hit on Google)... the guy who wrote it does some low level stuff with drive operation to maximize speed and it really works.... I was able to increase this drives throughput on USB2 by about 15% using fastcopy instead of just drag n drop.... back to this product Pro: - WD brand.... Ive had much better luck with WD than Seagate and others the last few years... they are all fragile devices, so dont spike them, but it seems like WD has been more reliable lately - it doesnt force you to use the onboard software which is awesome because Im a techie and dont want to use wizard BS. - has a monolithic supermodern look with no BS which I like - performance is good to great on USB 2.0 at 23MB / sec write, 35MB/ sec read... max possible is about 45MB/s but Ive never seen a 2.0 drive do even close to that ... Ill post 3.0 speeds when I can - it comes with WD SmartWare for windows and mac which is a wizard type management, encryption and continuous backup software.... looks like it can do the job, but I didnt try it.... search gH9Qj57PPgA on youtube to see a demo - no bright leds etc so it doesnt distract next to a TV or wherever... - 3TB size is nice n big - its a 3.5 Sata drive inside, so if you really need to, you can rip it apart and install in a PC in a pinch Con: - its a 3.5 drive so after you get the casing around it and all that, its large and not very portable, in comparison to smaller laptop hard drive based external drives, but they dont make them in 3TB versions yet - uses a new custom USB cable... so dont lose it and expect to pull one out of your spare parts easy.... overall it does the job, is well priced, and didnt force me to use its software... so I like it.... enjoy!

I bought this for backing up my photos, videos, and general files on multiple disks on a Windows 7 64 system and it works well. This drive reports its sector size as 512 bytes so it is completely compatible and works with Windows Backup. Drives that report sector size as 4K are not really compatible although they will work some of the time, but are very unreliable for use with Windows Backup and possibly other software. Unfortunately the technical information on external drives almost never lists the reported block size which makes selecting them difficult. Note that the actual physical sector size in almost all large drives is 4K, the difference is what size is reported to Windows. To get this information use a command prompt in admin mode with fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo and look at the Bytes per Sector entry which must be 512 for the drive to be full compatible. The software that comes with this drive is OK but not wonderful and the documentation is mediocre at best. Be sure to get the latest updates from the WD site, the version that comes with the drive is very flaky.

I purchased the 2 TB drive and got it 1/10/13 and less than two weeks later it died. I had read the large number of poor reviews but my previous experience with Western Digital had been very good. I realize that I made a mistake in purchasing it. I used the drive to back up a new computer using the USB 3.0 function and it performed fine. I then went to my old Windows XP computer and to copy files off it. After partially getting the files, the computer hung and the drive would not work. I looked at the event manager in XP and found that it had a large number of reported errors for the new drive for Bad Blocks and this caused the computer to hang. I retried it on both computers and you could not open the drive to see files or copy files and was unable to do that. I contacted Western Digital and the response was quick and they suggested a whole bunch of things including reformatting the drive. Do I really want a drive that has failed and has to be reformatted to use as a backup device? Not likely and at this point, I decided to return it for a replacement. I chose to have them ship me a new drive and then I would send mine back. I did this as I needed a drive quickly. The policy is that they charge your credit card until the old drive reaches them. BUT...the amount that they hold back was $185. I only paid about $120 and the current prices are about $99. What are they doing but trying to gouge money out of me? On top of that, I ended up paying $15 to ship the bad drive back. After I shipped it and complained about the shipping cost, they did offer to cover that but too little too late. I now have a re-certified in Malaysia drive which means it was a broken drive that they fixed. I works right now but given my current experience, I have very little faith in it. How do I trust is as a backup item? What does it say for a company that has so many poor reviews for the drives going bad? The drives are bad but their customer service response to bad drives is pretty quick. What does that mean? This was a very frustrating and time consuming series of events and this will be the last Western Digital Drive that I purchase. I would rather pay more for a drive that has a better reputation and reliability.

When it comes hard drive, what I usually look for is the size and whether it retains heat while exchanging files. This is a great drive from WD. I like WD since many years ago and it continue to produce great hardware. The drive itself is a 2tb drive and it is very fast. I cant believe that usb 3.0 is so much better than 2.0 usb. this drive comes in a sleak black color, shinny it is. has vents on sides that help to keep the drive cool. I bought this drive mainly to get it to store files and play on my playstation. Since playstation has a limit on 2tb, this is great. Formatting to Fat32 is a breezed. It came with a formatter as well. So for those that needed to format, you have everything in the drive, although you need to copy that formatter.exe file to your computer before you format. as for the durability, i say its great. I like for that fact that it feels solid and strong. When you hold it, you feel like it is made from a well made strong and quality material. Some drives you buy cheap will not have this feels. One thing I dont like about the drive is that not about its performance but rather maybe the black shinny outside shell tends to collect dust or maybe its black and it is easier for me to see. I clean it and later I see dust on it again. Although it does not affect the drive performance but it does look dirty if look at it close up. overall the price is decent. it isnt cheap or expensive for a 2tb drive. however, because of the brand I think you get it for a very good drive for backup.