WD - My Book Essential 3TB External USB 3.0/2.0 Hard Drive - Black

I've had this External Hard Drive for a little over 2 months now and overall, I have been very satisfied with it. I paid $149.99 for 3TB of storage space, which I thought was extremely reasonable after doing some research on other products that offered the same or less storage space at a higher price. It has a lock feature, which I found helpful so when other users are on the same PC, they are unable to access my files unless they know the password. Only downside I've experienced is sometimes it randomly disconnects from the USB port on the PC. I have it connected to my desktop and networked so I can also access it from my laptop. That was easy to set up, but it can be a little frustrating when the device gets disconnected. Overall, I would recommend this product to anyone looking to expand their PC's storage capabilities, and are also on a budget!

Got this last week in sale and couldnt be happier. Wanted to get a backup for my desktop to take on the road to use with my laptop. I have almost filled my internal 1Tb drive with movies and music,pics I needed this to drop those onto. There is a noticeable speed difference from usb 2.0 to 3.0. My laptop having the 3.0 port. Havent yet upgraded my desktop motherboard with usb 3.0 but that is next. Always have used WD hard drives over the years and never had any issues with them. Wish it would have been smaller, had to go and buy a small padded case for it to travel with. Overall I highly recommend this if you need massive backup of your files.

As a Mac User we are normally left as an after thought to most hardware developers and I am happy to say this product was not an afterthought for Mac Support. Format Out of the box it was properly formatted for a GUID partition which is essential for External Hard Drives & Intel based modern Mac OS systems. I reformatted drive with Apple's Disk Utility to be sure it worked properly and started the backup of over 2GB. It's still going strong with Apple's Backup software "Time Machine". It's important to note that for stability this drive should be directly connected to your machine's main USB connector and not a USB hub. Speed The hardware seems quite fast even on USB 2.0. It was very easily to setup and use. I like that it has only a small white front indicator light on the front. I tend to cover these with Black Electrical Tape as I don't need to see the light flashing and find it annoying. Design The case design is better than most. 1st its plastic, easily prone to scratches, yes a negative but as long as it sits on your desk and not a travel drive you should be fine. 2nd the Vent design is excellent. It has cooling vents on the top of the drive and back of the drive. These are essential for the life span of a HD. Heat will kill a drive very fast. This drive is rated upto 95 degree's. Which may be hard to use in the summer. But the cooling vents will really help a lot. Many of the external drives today do not have good cooling so be aware this when purchasing drives. Sound The great news is that the drive is very quiet and does work with automatic drive sleeping built into the operating system of the Mac. Conclusion If your looking for pure storage without the frills of multi connection (firewire, Sata etc) then this drive is an excellent choice. USB2/3.0 Connector is great and it will grow with your system if you decide to upgrade in a year or two. Cable is included in the box. Thanks Best Buy for a great deal at $150. I searched the internet and could not find a better deal anywhere.

So my first 3TB was locking up my system due to the hard drive having too many bad sectors (as confirmed by Western Digital's WinDlg tool). I exchanged the drive at Best Buy & the new drive is very impressive. I am seeing 85-115 MB/s transfer rates via USB 3. I use this to back up my e-sata backup drive (redundancy, redundancy, redundancy); and it is faaaast. It runs cool (unlike the Seagate 3TB), even though it is a 5 platter 7200rpm drive. Bottom line: this is a high performance drive with great value for those who need capacity over 2TB now. If you can live with 2TB save your money; but be sure to get either e-sata or USB3; any other interconnect you'll be waiting forever for file transfers to complete.

As always, Western Digital has made a great product. The 3TB drive works perfectly. I have written and read from it using a Macbook pro, a Dell running Windows 7, a netbook running XP and Vmware on the macbook. Unfortunately those who tend to review are the ones with complaints. I just want to say - have no fear, this is a great product for the price. People tend to forget that it takes a while to copy over 500GB of material to a hard drive. They are so used to copying megabytes, that they fail to realize that they are copying terabytes. 1 GB is 1000 megabytes and 1TB is 1000 gigabytes. If the drive and interface was the same speed as their old drive then the transfer of 1TB versus 1GB should take 1000 times as long. Luckily the interfaces and drives have improved so it only takes about 1 day per terabyte using USB 2. The drive is not slow, it just takes that long to copy that much data. I do not use the backup software or USB 3 yet. I own over 10 USB, firewire and network drive systems that I currently use. I hope that this review helps. Dan at Vigorotaku

I'll start off by saying that I don't use any of the backup software, or any of the software that comes with it for that matter. I always delete all that first thing. I manually back up what I need, so I can't speak to how well the software works. What I can say is that I have a lot of hard drives, mostly external USB. And this one performs with the best of them. Over the years, I've had Seagate, Samsung, Hitachi, and Western Digital drives. The WD drives have always out-performed and out-lived the others. I've had this drive for two months now, and it's working without problems. And once I got a USB 3.0 interface card installed in my computer (you'll probably need one of these, too), I ran a few speed tests. Speed going from an internal SATA drive to the WD 3TB had a sustained speed of ~80 MB/s. From an external USB 2.0 to the external USB 3.0, the sustained speed was ~40 MB/s. To put it into context, on both of those connections, I'm now getting 10x the speed I got when I had this same drive connected using USB 2.0. I'm loving it!

Goal: To consolidate files from multiple PC's, old external drives, and one iMac. Background: Tried using an online service and was severely disappointed in performance but knew ahead of time it would be slow. However, after two weeks I wasn't even a third of the way through my initial back up (on 20 Mbps, 4-6 hours a day). Using the below method I was done in 5 hours with 166 GB. System: Using USB 2.0 with Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit. The installation of the drive is plug it in. That's it. The firmware and software needed updating. A couple downloads from wdc.om with reboots and within 20 minutes I was ready for the first back up attempt. I found the instructions to partition the drive for PC and Mac on the wdc.com web site. If you need both just search "partition" on their site and it'll pop up. I decided not to do that and instead reformatted one of my external drives to use to back up my video files from the iMac. My first issue was with the software. It is very simple and effective back up software but what I really needed was to back up files that can I could connect the drive to any PC and copy to or from. You can't do that with WD's software. The software works great if you are just backing up local drives but for other external drives you can only restore directly back to those drives. Bummer. So, after running a test back up of 100 GB I found that it took around 140 seconds per GB. I thought was pretty good. But like I said what I really need to do is just have glorified 3 TB thumb drive. I downloaded Comodo Back Up which is a freeware. It allows for simple copy back ups which means after you run your back up you can access the folders and files just as you would any other local drive. The method of selecting all contents for your back up or selecting individual folders and files is exactly what the WD software does. But when you want to "restore" the files you can simply drag and drop the files in Windows Explorer from the WD drive to wherever you want. Using the WD software you are confined to copying them back to the exact same drive and folder structure. The simple copy method does take longer but in the end works perfect for me. As with the WD software if you abort the back up when you resume the back up starts where it left off. Nice functionality for freeware! Bottom line is the WD My Book 3 TB works fine whether you want it as a very simple back up solution with the software it provides or with a freeware like Comodo as a place to dump your files. I bought the drive for $129 with a price match. A little over $40 per TB is a decent price. NOTES: The drive doesn't "fall asleep" on me as some reviews stated. If you have an issue check the Preferences in the WD software and see what the time out is set at. No such issues with Comodo. WARNING: ERASE DISK MEANS JUST THAT :). I honestly thought the WD Erase feature would just wipe out the files backed up. Oops. It completely formatted the drive and all the factory-installed manuals, drivers, and software. If you do that just go back out to the wdc.om site and download the latest files. All that said if you use the method I am then any external drive should work. Just figure out the cost per TB and balance that with the quality of the manufacturer. Enjoy.

I bought it to be a backup to my almost full 1tb backup drive. That part works fine. However- on my new Toshiba e205 I am unable to create a windows system image or use windows backup with this drive. I use the provided WD backup utility at the moment. When trying to use Win7 to create a system image- the PC complains and I get a red "verfy your backup" error code (0x8078002A) , which defeats one of the general reasons why i have this drive. I suspect this drive has a 4kb internal block size - which is fairly new to the PC world...and it appears that M$ does not have an official patch for Win7 out yet that I can find. I believe this particular KB article may be a general cause/resolution: 982018