Western Digital - My Book Essential 2TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

This is my first 3.0 deivce, I wasn't honestly expecting that much of a boost in performance other than the standard 2.0 speed of averaging 10mb. This thing peaked at 40MB and then averaged to about 30-35MB. This is BEAST. the case is all metal so it has even more efficient cooling (remember, any device running any sort of current carries load, and that energy is converted to heat). No, this model doesn't have the cool LED bars for visual storage. But honestly, who would look at the light for storage space when you have your OS? It's nice feature, but it's IMO, it's just another thing that get's broken, this My Book is simple and the older model but it is still amongst the top choices for a reputable external drive To those complaining about speed... ...YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG. You will need 2.0 or higher USB capable board or a PCI card. Your system must be capable of 2.0 or higher. You must have updated OS drivers, updated BIOS, and a system to handle the transfer speed. If you have a weak prebuilt station or economy station running XP or lower,expect drawbacks as it won't allow the device to perform at it's true/maximum potential. You can wipe the drive and remove the my book essentials programming and have a clean slate drive. The drives makes no sound, infact, it's no louder than my case fans, of which i can hear my internals over. I am currently transfering 1.5TB worth of Movies/Shows/Music and freeing up my internal drives for more torrent abuse. The system is 3.0 so it needs the power brick to be able to power through it's high transfer speed. Obviously, it's cheaper online, but i needed it now and BestBuy had these on sale.

I have had no issues with this drive since purchase, and have since bought to more which I have stacked. While your mileage may very depending on your computer specs, you cannot go wrong here. Western Digital was playing a loosing game in recent years with many of its drives, however, they have finally stepped up to the plate and started to make quality drives again. Performance while it may not be the best it is certainly close, and everyday users will not notice much of a difference. The only con that I can think of is that the power button feels cheap. Every time I press it I'm afraid it will break off. So far it hasn't, so I'm not too worried about it. I leave the drive running 24/7 anyway and only turn them off when I need to move them around. The software that comes with the drive is not mandatory as one other has stated.

This is a great hard drive easy to use and setup, pretty much just plug and go. Its pre-formatted and ready to use from the moment you plug it in. I bought this on a one day sale for $75.. cant go wrong at that price. Somewhat disappointed at the packaging/shipping from BB... some sort of padding in the box used for shipping would have been nice. Especially with equipment like this that is sensitive to movement/jolts. Only reason i marked it down for ease of installation is because of the annoying 'WD Smartware' drive that loads/mounts automatically. I haven't used the software and really don't see a need for it. If i want to backup my information i will find a program online that is more robust. You can disable this 'Smart Drive'. It requires downloading 2 separate programs.. check this link from WD for more information. At least they let you disable it. http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3835/p/228/session/L3RpbWUvMTMyMDY3NDA5NS9zaWQvdUVSY0F3SWs%3D

This is 2nd 2 TB external WD HD used in household for backup of iMac systems. The 1st one made the choice for a 2nd one extremely easy, but in the interim time between purchases, WD put a feature in the firmware that was not needed or wanted for use as backup operations. The unfortunate side was it was nearly IMPOSSIBLE to disable the feature, making the setup less than enjoyable, relative to the 1st WD 2 TB install.

I use this drive to expand my Synology NAS via USB. I reformated to native file system and it's humming along with two other WD500BG drives on the same NAS. It seems to be ablet to handle streaming HiDef movies no problem at all.

Who knows what Technodave is talking about in the previous review?? Yes, the drive ships formatted in FAT32. Yes, it ships with some pretty useless software installed. THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO REASON YOU CAN'T REFORMAT THE DRIVE TO NTFS! I've got at least 15 USB hard drives and reformating them is always the very first thing I do with all new drives, most of them come with FAT32 formatting. I've never heard of any which would (for what conceivable reason?) prevent you from reformatting the drive. In spite of his handle, Technodave apparently doesn't know how to format a drive. There's nothing to prevent you from doing so.

I already had 3 WD external USB hard drives, and they are great. All I did was unpack them, plug in the USB port, and they were up and running. This WD My Book Essential insatlled SmartWare. I didn't care for it much, but I could have lived with what was installed. SmartWare informed me that there was an update for SmartWare, and I downloaded the installer. When I ran it, it said I needed .NET 3.5 on my pc. I didn't want to install .NET, so I clicked OK, thinking I just exited the update process and that was that. When I shut off my pc, a Windows update that took about 20 minutes ensued. The next day I discovered that .NET items had been installed, but the installation had failed. Now, SmartWare cannot run, Windows Update wants to install a .NET update that constantly fails. I tried to remove SmartWare via ControlPanel-Add/Remove Programs, and that fails. I'm disgusted that WD installed the .NET components without asking me if I wanted them or not. My system is in some unknown state where Windows wants to constantly install .NET updates that fail to install. This is going to be the last WD product I buy. It should have been my decision to install or not install the .NET components. Even though the hard drive seems to be working, I am left with a pc with SmartWare and .NET problems that won't go away.

I have been using WD for approximately four (4) years and owned a 200, 320, 500 GB external HD passports and now two Books with 1&2 TB capacity. I have never had any problems thus far.