Western Digital 1TB My Book Review
Back in December of 2007 we purchased the USB version of Western Digital’s My Book Essential Edition 1TB external hard drive for £159.99 from Amazon. Since then the price has dropped to £89.98. Ouch.
Having always purchased Western Digital hard drives and never seeing any disk or cable failures it becomes difficult to understand how so many people see these drives fail. Its either pure luck on our part or people are not treating these things correctly. In reality it’s probably a mixture of the two. Issue number one, putting all your eggs in one basket, one terabyte is still a significant amount of data. If you have the desk space and an extra socket it may be smarter to spread the risk and purchase two 500GB hard drives for a similar price.
Almost 11 months have passed problem free, the drive looks great, its very quiet, fast and we get 931.5GB of actual storage. The software that comes with device is fairly abysmal, as long as your computer is relatively new (less than 8 years old) it should work out the box without the need to install any software or drivers.
On Amazon you might find some odd reviews and some plain untrue, this one probably slots into the ‘odd’ category. Ms. S. Johnson explained how her 6-month-old hard drive failed,
“Apart from the occasional rebooting of explorer from this ‘My Book’ I thought well that’s a quirk – today there was a bump it jumped about an inch in the air (NOTE – IT JUMPED BY ITSELF – I did not knock it – the inertia of the internal failure was that bad).”
Mr. R. C. Dawson stated,
“If you use Mac, do not buy a Western Digital Drive. It will not partition and cannot be reformatted for Mac. There are tutorials available trying to solve this. They do not work. WD support is useless. The drive is a waste of time and money. Avoid.”
This statement simply isn’t true. Our drive is formatted with NTFS and is fully readable by our Mac Pro. Mac doesn’t come with the ability to write to NTFS out the box. However software is readily available that allows you to write to NTFS as well as read from it.
Although our experiences have shown Western Digital to be only a shining beacon of reliability (our 250GB WD external hard drive purchased June 2005 works as if new) there seems to be an overwhelming number of people who would disagree.
Beware when purchasing hard drives, due to moving parts they will never be 100% reliable.
