WD My Book 1TB External Hard Drive Storage USB 3.0 File Backup and Storage

This was a good deal on a high-capacity hard drive. I wanted to get a drive that would theoretically be the last external storage I would ever need, and I was pleased that this one at least offered some means of eventually upgrading to USB 3.0. So far its working great with no problems. I converted it to FAT32 for use with my PS3 and had no problems doing so. I use it to backup files and store music, video, etc. that I wont always have room for on my computers hard drive. I dont use it for automatic backup, so I cant comment on that. I rated the bundled software at 1 star because I have no interest in it and wish it had come without. They should just give you a code to download that stuff if you want it. For people worried that it cant be removed or the drive will not work correctly, I have not had any issues after removing it and reformatting to FAT32. I have only had this for about 6 months, so long-term viability is still to be seen, but so far I dont have any complaints and still consider it a good deal.

I bought this for backing up my photos, videos, and general files on multiple disks on a Windows 7 64 system and it works well. This drive reports its sector size as 512 bytes so it is completely compatible and works with Windows Backup. Drives that report sector size as 4K are not really compatible although they will work some of the time, but are very unreliable for use with Windows Backup and possibly other software. Unfortunately the technical information on external drives almost never lists the reported block size which makes selecting them difficult. Note that the actual physical sector size in almost all large drives is 4K, the difference is what size is reported to Windows. To get this information use a command prompt in admin mode with fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo and look at the Bytes per Sector entry which must be 512 for the drive to be full compatible. The software that comes with this drive is OK but not wonderful and the documentation is mediocre at best. Be sure to get the latest updates from the WD site, the version that comes with the drive is very flaky.

This would be an awesome hard drive, with a very large capacity, decent read/write speeds, and USB 3.0, except for a very annoying problem of constant disk overload errors. Yes, I have updated to the latest firmware and whatever software they bundle (which is thankfully very customizable in terms of which features to install from it, since the only really useful one for people who have good computer sense and can find better alternatives for the others is the password protection), but this did not resolve the problem. I am hopeful that future firmware updates will, but until then, this drive really deserves no more than 3 stars. When one plugs it in, it works fine for a while. Then, once it is in use for no more than 30 seconds, the disk becomes overloaded and ceases to read or write for a couple minutes. While not a critical problem, it hinders all use of the drive for a while with every restart or resumption from standby. If it didnt last so long, it would be fine, but it does this (every single time, mind you) for around 5-10 minutes (for a more accurate estimate, it has been overloaded for the entire time Ive been writing this review). My other WD hard drive has no such problems, and since Ive had that one for over a year with no disk failures, Im confident in the longevity of this drive, but the disk errors are a major, central flaw that should have been resolved long before shipping this product.

Bought for my father-in-law. He had no backup setup, and only one internal drive, It took about 10 minutes to setup and get backup started to the My Book I have used the WD software in the past. Its a little buggy and is updated often. When it is updated a reboot and disconnect has been required. Not sure that would be done with a novice. I didnt bother with it this time, just format and use. I wasnt buying this for the software anyway. I buy Western Digital because it is Western Digital. We did a backup and set a schedule, made a boot DVD and ran a test boot from the DVD. PERFECT!!. At least I feel better that my telephone tech-support is going to be easier.(LOL) I now own 7 WD drives. NEVER a problem. in over 20 years. I would say thats a pretty good record. I have heard the complaints about the USB-3 plug being fragile , however I dont know. The reason is, I plug it in and never touch it again. Probably what you would do as well. I highly recommend this drive. Great purchase. Great price, Plus its Western Digital. What more could you want?

When the drive became unresponsive and started continually clicking whenever powered on, I was fairly disappointed. This disappointment was exaggerated when I contacted Western Digital. Their website design seems very odd, but at least I was able to create RMA. The advance replacement option was selected, which pre-authorized my credit card for twice the amount that I originally paid through Amazon for the drive! But thats OK, since it SHOULDNT come out. However, once I received the replacement I discover theres no return shipping label. Contacting WD, I find out that standard practice is that CUSTOMER PAYS FOR RETURN SHIPPING. So, not only am I exposed to data loss with my new backup drive dying almost immediately, I have to pay extra to have this defective unit replaced. Other drive vendors do not have this practice, and automatically provide return shipping. To WD credit, when I made noise in a new support ticket, they provided a return shipping label. But its kind of ridiculous that I had to do this to begin with. I made a conscious effort here to try moving from Seagate to WD for my home library backup drive, and Im regretting it now. Maybe Ill have to go back...

I like the tiny white LED dot on the front. Just the right size and brightness for me. Some other drives have LEDs that are simply way too bright and annoying for use in my bedroom. USB 3 is fast on this drive. I dont have the numbers on me. If you are interested, leave a comment and I will get the numbers for you. I have the 2 TB model using an MBR partition and I havent had any issues using this drive 24/7 over the past aprox. 1.5 years. Though I have heard a fair amount of people having issues with multiple brands of drives that are 3+ TB using a GPT partition. I have found data recovery to be pretty reliable with MBR partitions, but I have had poor luck with data recovery of data on GPT partitions. The main lesson for people is that a backup is only a backup if the data is in multiple places at the same time. So if a drive fails, you should have the data somewhere else already so you can simply replace the drive by warranty or buying another one; and getting the duplication going again. I have had people bring drives to me for recovery because they were storing a single copy of the data on their external drive. That is not the purpose of an external drive. Or at least that is not the ideal purpose. If you are doing that because of internal space limitations on your device; then make sure the data is duplicated somewhere. Again, I love this drive. Simply case, large vents, great white LED indicator that is the right low-brightness for me. And fast USB 3.

I got this drive mostly because of its energy star rating. If it werent for that I would not have bought it due to the many complaints about its USB connectors being easy to break. I like that the drive turns on automatically after a power failure which makes it great for backups. It does have soft power button that will turn the drive off if necessary, and of course it goes into power save mode if its not in use. I dont like the hard drive activity light which is just a white LED buried somewhere deep inside the housing. You can only see it if you look carefully and at the right angle, or if the room is completely dark the inside of the case lights up faintly. Many reviewers complain about getting bad drives, but I see as many or more bad drive reviews of every brand these days - manufacturers just dont seem to care about quality anymore. So I ran both of these drives through at least 16 days of testing using Ubuntu and a spare computer. Unfortunately I dont have any USB 3.0 systems and writing a repeating bit pattern of 0x55 to every byte on the drive followed by reading it back again takes around 55 hours. I let it write and read 0x55 and 0xaa and then aborted the test before it wrote/read 0x00 and 0xff. I started using that drive for backups and tested the second drive, which I let get through all four tests (0x55, 0xaa, 0x00, 0xff), and then I had it do a random write/read test where it writes random data to the drive and then reads back the data it recently wrote. This forces the heads on the drive to move back and forth a lot. The second drive passed all of these tests which took about 10 days total. If you want to test your own drive, first back up the software thats on the drive because these tests will erase the drive. Download any version of Ubuntu (free), burn to CD or USB flash memory, and you can boot your computer from the CD/USB without making any changes to your regular hard drive by choosing to Try Ubuntu. Once booted, open Applications > Accessories > Terminal, and type this command: sudo fdisk -l Find the line that says Disk /dev/___ 3000.6 GB and note what the value of ___ is. In my case, the 3000.6 GB drive was /dev/sdc but yours may be different. Now type the following: badblocks -vw /dev/___ Replace ___ with the correct device name on your system. BE SURE YOU USE THE CORRECT DEVICE NAME SINCE YOU ARE GOING TO COMPLETELY ERASE THAT DEVICE WITH THIS TEST. You can also run badblocks -v /dev/___ which should prevent erasing the drive by re-writing what used to be on the drive as it goes along, but the test will take twice as long. The tests have very little in the way of progress indicators but theyll tell you when they start writing each of the four sets of bytes and when they start reading those bytes. They will also tell you when the whole set of tests is done and if there are any errors. If you want to perform the random data write/read test, run these commands: dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/___ & dd if=/dev/___ of=/dev/null These tests will always erase your hard drive. While the test is running, you will just see a flashing cursor on an empty line. When the test is done, you will see the $ command prompt again. If there are errors, youll see them, but it wont tell you anything on success.

This 2TB hard drive workds great to extend the memory on my DishNetworks ViP 722K recorder. This price of $109.99 is less than the 1TB WD for $119.99 recommended on Dishs Website. After connecting the power and usb connections, this hard drive needed to be formated. I went to Menu, then multimeda, then it asked me if I wanted to format the harddrive. It took around 15 minutes or so, then the DVR recorder had to find the signal again. After all was said and done, total time was less than 30 min. total setup to get everything up and running. I did call dishnetwork to talk me through the formating part. Just didnt know where to find it. Movies take about 13-15 min to transfer over to the harddrive. One thing I like is that once I copy what I want to the harddrive, when I go to MY RECORDINGS, MY MEDIA comes up at the top of the list, so it is easy to find.

First the bad: The automatic backup function is seriously flawed. The default setting is to save files by Category. After the first backup, the software would no longer save new files. For 3 weeks, the software would tell me that all my files were backed up, 100%, all good. But I could see that nothing new had been saved to the My Book. I discovered in the community forum that sometimes the software doesnt recognize MS Office 2010 file extensions (docx, xlsx, etc). I purchased this product in 2013! I couldnt believe this could be true. However, I simply switched the method of back-up to select folder locations on my laptop. The device then properly saved over 30 GB of files which had not been previously saved because of the file type. In addition to Word, Excel, and other Office 2010 files, it appears that FLAC and SHN files were not being backed-up. This was corrected easily enough because I took the time to research it, but an email to WD support only resulted in the standard solutions: make sure no files are open, dont let the computer sleep, etc. I am amazed that a product would be sold in 2013 that does not recognize MS Office 2010 or FLAC files. Even more amazing is that WD hasnt sent a patch to update the software. Having fixed the software issue, the device works great. It doesnt heat up. Its fast. And I havent had any issues with the USB connections that others have mentioned. My problems with the software may not happen every time, but there are enough posts on the community forum to suggest that this wasnt an isolated incident.

This Western Digital 3 TB External Hard Drive