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

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.

I thought this product was going to be great. With Western Digital how could I go wrong? I bought the My Book Elite on 5-21-10. The hook up and ease of use were both very simple and straight forward. I used the My Book Elite every now and then I stored about 1tb of music on the drive. Most of the time it was unplugged and off. I hooked it up to use it last week and it was working fine. I made the mistake of leaving it on all night on my desk along with my computer, printer and everything else on my desk. The next morning the top of the My Book Elite was a little warped and the side was too, it would not power up. All other electronics plugged in to the same surge protector are just fine. It is 6-25-2010 13 months after I bought the external hard drive it malfunctions. I may have used it a total of 30 days in the time I owned it. I may be unreasonable to expect this product to last a little longer than it did. Tech support at Western Digital thinks I am. They also explained to me that the My Book Elite is not for backup storage! The customer pays for shipping, prorated replacement fee and the data recovery fee in full. I would not recommend this product to anyone.

The hardware appears to be working properly. The software is in one word terrible! After loading the initial version things appeared to be working properly, but I succumbed to the request to upgrade the software. During this process by the way they attempt to lead you into purchasing things you don't need. After the upgrade the system failed. It would not back up anything. After a 40 minute discussion with the tech, we uninstalled everything and reinstalled. Now it works partially. That is it backed up if I selected individual files and folders but not if I tried to do a complete backup of my documents - the default option. After the backup of My Documents and several other folders the Retrieve function will NOT show me the files and folders in the My Documents folder although it does show the drop down file listing for other folders. All the files are on the external drive and I can just go there and follow the file tree to the file I am interested in and copy it back to my internal drive. So I have a work around, but cannot use their software to do it! Positive: It does appear to back up a file as soon as it is saved which is the main option I wanted and used to select this external drive. WD response? Boilerplate garbage about upgrading a lot of other software on my computer. How can that explain that it opens some folders but not others. The frustration in trying to start up such a routine device was far too much. I do not recommend this product.

I bought one of these drives at Staples and connected it via USB 2.0. it worked great for about two months... so, I went to BestBuy and bought 4 more which I intended to create a RAID5 out of. When I plugged them all in to my computer, none of them showed up as USB devices. Confused, I tried them on three other computers. Nothing. I couldn't format them, couldn't upgrade the firmware, nothing. They did not show as being attached to the computer at all. One didn't even power on. Returned the 4 drives and exchanged them for 4 new ones. Those worked for about 2 days, then suddenly exhibited the same symptoms. I believe the USB controller card inside the enclosure is faulty and fails. Those 4 drives went right back to BestBuy. Now, I am experiencing the same issue with the final drive which I purchased from Staples. It is past the return period and I needed to get data off of it. Western Digital said they can not retrieve data from the drive if I send it back for an RMA, so I removed it from the enclosure and hooked it up via SATA internally. AS SOMEONE ELSE MENTIONED ABOVE, THE INTERNAL DRIVE USES HARDWARE ENCRYPTION AND SO YOU CANNOT ACCESS THE DATA ON IT!!!! This is true EVEN IF YOU DO NOT ENABLE ENCRYPTION ON THE DRIVE. DO NOT BUY THESE. Never in my 10+ years in the technology industry have I seen such catastrophic failure.

When the WD's first came out, we were so glad to have the option of a good external hard drive. The WD we purchased three years ago failed, so we bought this one...thinking we could transfer data or somehow recover two years of photographs and important information. We tried everything (including other vendors) ... and WD takes the attitude that you are pretty much on your own. They did not reply to emails to assist us. When we talked to them on the phone, they kept it at a novice level asking stupid questions from a script when our level of understanding was far beyond that. We were always good at backing up our data elsewhere beside WD, but we were very busy with a multitude of things and got hit because of our failure to do adequate back ups. This hard drive WILL fail you eventually. We have a new one now but don't trust it. If WD had sincerely tried to help us recover our data, perhaps we could write something positive...but alas, they have terrible customer service. If you are saving important data, it is not worth the risk of having this hard drive. We have pretty much chalked this one up to one bad experience that we never want to repeat.

This is a misconception. Most people that have rated this 5 stars are people who just opened the box and it worked. When I first got it, it worked great and I would have rated it 5 stars also. But you should rate this product after you used it for a couple of months. After using this for about 5 months, it crashed. My computer isn't able to read it and the light just blinks and the fan doesn't run either. I lost all my data and to recover it, it cost about $1000 to recover it (because its 2TB) and it would also be from a third party because Western Digital does not have a recovery program. This particular problem has happened to many western digital users if you look at there community forums. I strongly agree that you shouldn't buy this product. It is a waste of your money, it's not safe for your data and it is not reliable in the long run. I hope you don't make the same mistake I did because you'll regret it. I have to pay $1000 because it's data that I can not afford to lose.

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.

I have bought 5 WD brand external hard drives in my lifetime. After owning 3 non-responsive external hard drives from WD, I will never buy WD again. The 1st one (250GB) lasted for about 3 years. I bought the 2nd one (500GB) while the 1st one was still working cuz I needed more storage. This one is still working to this day (knock on wood), but seems unstable at times. It takes me 3 years to max out storage on 500GB. So I go and upgrade my 3rd one to a 1TB HD and after a year out of warranty, that one fails to connect to any computer. So I got my 4th one (2TB) as a B-day present and that one also quits after a year out of warranty with only about 250GB use of storage. I decided to give another chance at WD and got my 5th one (2TB) on a sales promotion and will be using it temporarily. I don't trust it and will be getting another brand to use frequently to store hours of composed trance music of mine and others. All 3 defective hard drives seem to have connection issues rather than an internal failure with the hard drive itself, as it doesn't make that clicking noise symptom associated to internal HD failure. Might be a WD software bug. I would not recommend WD external drives.