Western Digital - My Book Essential 640GB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

I bought this MyBook the other day looking to back up my movies and other important data. I own a previous 250gb model which is a year or so old, and still going strong. Western digital makes a great external and they are very reliable. With this new one i found several dissapointments. The older mybook had a button on the front to put it into sleep and shut it down this new version doesn't have that and it is shiny and smudges easily also seems to get warmer than my older one. Also the usb cable and power cable were shorter than expected. The positives are the case is smaller and looks sleeker and the blue light isn't to bright. It came formatted in FAT32 so i reformatted to NTFS. After formatting you only have 596gb so its 44gb in formatting which seems a little much for a 640gb drive. Overall good product and will use again but western digital's quality has gone down in the past year.

I like this product. Don't download all the junk that comes on it though. Just get your user's manual and it's ready to go. The junk on it just wastes space on your hard drive and they are all just trial versions. I hated that it makes me waste a ton more trees than they could if they would include an user's manual in the box. It took me twice as many pages than it would them. Not very user friendly if you're trying to read manual on the screen and figure out what you're supposed to be doing with the thing. Just get it. Don't download anything. Print the user's manual....unfortuantly....and waste trees. Use this thing. It holds massive amounts of space but I also noticed I paid for 640GB and the actual available space is only 596GB so watch out for that rip off of 44GB. Not alot but enough that it bothers me. I did not get my full 640GB. Not cool Western Digital.

Working great so far. I'm using it for backup storage on my PS3. Transfering files from computer to PS3 and the other way around with ease. The only thing I don't like is moving it back and forth from my computer to PS3. FAT32 is the format PS3 needs and it came ready to go, out of the box. I did accidently switch it to NTSF by formating the thing. I then used some program I found to switch it back to FAT32 and it works fine now.

I couldnt get my computer to restart while this HD was connected. called support and got the worst Barekt speaking English support ever. And the long distance connection was full of static which didn't help either. Long story short: I couldn't find anyone to help me set this up at WD. It was probably something that was simple to set in my Bios but because there was no way either me or the support representative could understand eachother i ended up returning this drive to Best Buy. It probably would have been a decent product. It comes initialized in fat32, which is a pain if you want to copy large files. Formatting this many gigs took the better part of an afternoon. It was very silent and compact.

Bought this to back up my laptop since all my colleagues' are crashing. Installation instructions were a diagram, no options. Plugged in, and started to download the mirroring software. I thought, "this was awesome, just what I needed!" Then the pop up window says, "Hey, if you want to continue using this software, shell out 39.99 and its yours" BOOOOO WD for doing this. It is almost like buying a car and the dealer asking you for 400 bucks 30 days later for the tires! If you want ease of use, hopefully there is another mfgr that makes one with the software included

First of all, this drive does not really hold 640 GB, only 596. The other 44 goes to formatting or some junk which I don't really understand. Also delete the AutoSync software it comes with cause it takes up space too. Plus you have to pay for it and if you don't delete it you get really annoying popups everytime you start your computer. Other than that the drive seems to be OK and easy to use. No problems so far.

So far so good. I've had the drive for several months and havent had any problems. The initial set up was easy. I have an IMac and a MacBook Pro and just reformatted it to MAC OS Extended and it's working fine as my Time Machine Backup drive. I've had pretty good success with WD drives and recommend them to all. So much so that I recently bought another one for my son.

Purchased it in May. Had an attractive price. Uploaded ALL my pics I've ever had. In July,... found it didn't want to work anymore. The internal software had disappeared and it was not recognizable on any computer. Tried many diff. comps & USB's. No luck at all. Was told by a Comp. Tech. that the HardDrive was bad. Thank God I have a comp.savy tech brother who can recover it. This piece of you know what,.. is going in the trash. This was my 1st Ext.HD I've ever purchased too. ;+( -Now, I'll just back everything on cd's from this point on to the remainder of my life. If your info you want to put on an Ext. Harddrive is not important to you,.. then this is certainly the product for you. Maybe thats why it's onsale. They should take the product off shelves period. You buy an Ext.HD to not have to worry about this happening.