WD - My Book Essential 2TB External USB 3.0/2.0 Hard Drive - Black

I bought it for an amazingly unbelievable price, got it home plugged it in, Windows Vista 32 bit driver update instantly went online and found the correct drivers and installed them in the background, and now I have awesome drag and drop functionality of nearly 2TB usable space. Could not be any happier. I like the tiny little whiteish blue light. Runs cool as can be, it's silent and USB 3.0! Comes with two installation pamphlets. WD went out of their way to make this drive conform to the needs of the average consumer and even the techie should be pleased. The case is rugged and, well, it is simply a great buy.

I have used this hard drive continuously since I purchased it and it has worked without fail. I owned several external hardrives before this and they kept failing. The company would replace them but what about the pictures and the data? Gone. So having a reliable hard drive is essential. I do use an online backup service to back up the hard drive because of my earlier experiences but have never had to use the service to return my data.

Performance can always be improved. I want per cpu clock cycle access to tertiary storage, one can only dream. (SSD's barely deserve a rating of Good for performance, where's giga(tera?)byte/s?) Back to mybook... I am not a fan of the extra layers of USB driver stuff that may or may not need to be installed. SES driver what? As for my experience: I bought this drive when my desktop system drive was dying. I used an XP laptop (usb2) to format it. I always do a full format on a new drive... so the format took a very long time. After format, used a live linux to backup data from the failing system drive (a 1tb drive) to this "My Book". The aforementioned format was successful without issues. Plugged it into my dying system (which only has USB2) and backed everything up. This took multiple reboots due to the system HDD crapping out. Each reboot was another restart of the file transfer... eventually everything I cared about was recovered. In the meantime I bought an SSD to replace the 'system' HDD, onto which I installed Win7... Once into Win7, I noticed this "My Book" 2tb usb drive was not showing up. Under computer management / disk management, the partition showed up... but it was "raw". Obviously I refused to format. I retried the drive in the XP laptop, all the backed up files showed up. I rebooted the desktop, that now had win7 on the SSD, into a live linux, and the 2tb "My Book" worked just fine. I never got it to work in Win7. Then I finally received the RMA replacement for the 1TB HDD. I promply formatted from within Win7, then rebooted into a live linux and transferred everything off this 2tb usb drive (all with usb2). Trusting that my data was safe on the new internal HDD, I went ahead and formatted the 'Raw' partition that showed up from within Win 7. Then I backed everything up to the USB drive again. I have since upgraded, and have a USB3 port. I tested the USB3 speeds of this drive, and found them faster than the 1tb internal HDD, so I decided to move the 1tb drive to the previous computer that killed the first 1tb drive, and have since installed all games onto this 2tb "My Book" USB3 drive. In case you lost track, the new system with a USB3 port now only has a 64GB SSD and this 2TB USB3 drive, and the games load off this drive faster than they did off the previous internal 1tb drive... though the speed increase could be a symbiotic result of the 6 core (12 thread) i7 processor and 12GB of RAM along with this drive. Additionally, this drive also still works in the XP laptop, as well as in the live linux environment. I have no idea why the format from within XP wasn't liked by win7, but the format from within win7 is liked by everything I've tried it in. Long story short, if you reformat this drive, use windows 7. (And, ignore the SES driver messages.) I would like a massage though... shoulders and neck are tight.

This W.D. backup Hard Drive is a great value, it's my third W.D. Mybook and it's bigger at a lower price being now on sale at Best Buy. simple to install just plug in the USB cable and the power cord. There is no written instructions on how to use the back up software,but you will find a good manual in PDF file form in a directory of other files. Getting to quickly understand just how to retrieve your backed up files is not so simple. They don't just end up visible on the drive. You must use the software to retrieve the files you want, this requires picking where you want the files to be sent, back where they came from or into another place. This takes a little trial and error and more trial. But after you get the hang of how the software works, you will really like it. Just don't give up trying. Reading the PDF file manual is very helpful. The software runs all the time and will back up all new files or adjusted files without you having to do anything. This W.D. Mybbok is a real nice package, and the price is great for what you get.

Bought this to replace a 5+ year old 250GB WD My Book that was totally full for storing photos, music and other files. Literally plug and play! File transfer from the old drive was quick and didn't lose a thing. I use this with Windows 7 Home and love the fact that I can see capacity at a glance. I plan to get another so I can split photos and music files to separate drives. This drive is a lot more sleek and less "chunky" than the original. It's also a lot less distracting as you only have a small white light that flashes instead of the huge ring or spiral on the older versions. It's extremely quiet, quick and dependable. I did remove the auto backup software from the drive as I wanted it for maximum storage and already have backup software on my Lenovo anyway. Oh, by the way, the original My Book is still in use as well as an external drive for large files on my work computer!

The drive is simple to unpack and plug into your computer. Instructions that arrive with it, walk you through the process. Its small form can fit in most places or shelves. Software installation is straight forward. The interface is fairly simple and easy enough to begin a backup. Since the backups are not encrypted, its not too difficult to find the files on the drive to simply copy a few over to another location, i.e. a thumb drive. For security there is an encryption with password option to protect the drive if it should be stolen. Restoring files is just a simple and straight forward. The light bar on the front indicate how full is the drive, which allows for quick glance to see if the backups are too much. It would be nice if they designed an active cooling system if the drive is located in an area where temps get warmer or when the vents are partially blocked preventing good air flow from the passive cooling. I have been using this 2gig drive to backup another 1gig external drive and my PC internal drive.

Given that I haven't been running this drive more than a month, it's great so far. The price for 2TB was very good and it's super easy to use. Plug and play pretty much. It didn't come loaded with too much extra junk though it does have its own program that it installs on your system for using it, which is always faintly annoying but it doesn't seem to have caused any issues on my XP system. For a big fat backup drive, which was my use, so far excellent.

Installing and using the WD My Book Essential 2 TB external hard drive to back up my wife's computer files was very easy to do and the device works very well in the background without much of any effort on my part. I'm very happy with it. The only problem i encountered was with getting the update for the SmartWare software. I had to call Western Digital support twice to get the update problem resolved. (Neither I nor the second level support person knew why my HP desktop running Windows 7 Pro would not automatically take the upgrade, but we did get it installed after spending a total of just over an hour on the phone with two different WD Support technicians. Now the drive is working perfectly!