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

external hard drives have become kind of mundane, but some are better than others.... useful hint: if you are technical, theres a free handy drive copy tool called Fastcopy (first hit on Google)... the guy who wrote it does some low level stuff with drive operation to maximize speed and it really works.... I was able to increase this drives throughput on USB2 by about 15% using fastcopy instead of just drag n drop.... back to this product Pro: - WD brand.... Ive had much better luck with WD than Seagate and others the last few years... they are all fragile devices, so dont spike them, but it seems like WD has been more reliable lately - it doesnt force you to use the onboard software which is awesome because Im a techie and dont want to use wizard BS. - has a monolithic supermodern look with no BS which I like - performance is good to great on USB 2.0 at 23MB / sec write, 35MB/ sec read... max possible is about 45MB/s but Ive never seen a 2.0 drive do even close to that ... Ill post 3.0 speeds when I can - it comes with WD SmartWare for windows and mac which is a wizard type management, encryption and continuous backup software.... looks like it can do the job, but I didnt try it.... search gH9Qj57PPgA on youtube to see a demo - no bright leds etc so it doesnt distract next to a TV or wherever... - 3TB size is nice n big - its a 3.5 Sata drive inside, so if you really need to, you can rip it apart and install in a PC in a pinch Con: - its a 3.5 drive so after you get the casing around it and all that, its large and not very portable, in comparison to smaller laptop hard drive based external drives, but they dont make them in 3TB versions yet - uses a new custom USB cable... so dont lose it and expect to pull one out of your spare parts easy.... overall it does the job, is well priced, and didnt force me to use its software... so I like it.... enjoy!

Well--it arrived on time. When I opened the box, the box the unit was in had one corner slightly dented. I didnt think too much of it. So I assembled it and everything seemed to be working fine. I backed up a few movie on it. But---when I tried playing it back...the drive completely shut down by itself. Id bought several external drive from Western Digital before, but I never had one so large. I was thinking the shutdown was a fluke. But as I tried using the drive--recording to the drive was effortless and trouble-free. But each time I would try running a movie Id backed up on the drive it would run for 20 minutes and freeze and or/completely shut down. You can imagine my frustration. Additional Warning: Do NOT stand this product UPRIGHT as it is shown! WHEN this HD tips over your drive can be catastrophically harmed. I decided to call WD tech-support and find out from them what was happening. The told me the DRIVE WAS OVERHEATING! They provided outstanding customer service, and told me to pack it up and send it to them--they paid the shipping. So thats what I did. I am expecting a replacement soon. So who is at fault? The drive arrived unopened, packed in original packaging--it appeared. It felt like Id just bought from the store. I dont know if the vendor knew the drives actual condition. Did the dent on the corner of the box indicate it had been dropped at some point? I dont know.

I only have USB 2.0 so I cant test how it works with 3.0. But with 2.0, it works the same as any of the 50 or so other USB external hard drives I have. I use my own backup software so I cant comment on any included software. So far, it has been reliable but since I only use it maybe once a week to once a month and the rest of the time it sits in a safe, its not getting any hard use. Edit: Ive been using this drive for a while now and finally bought this USB 3.0 Express Card for my laptop:

I set this up without activating any of the special software, and did not set it up for automatic backups. I prefer to do manual backups, because of concerns that I have about automatic programs. So far, everything is going well. It is a lot of space for not too much money. I say this as someone who got into computer use when 1 GB cost as much as these 3 TB! My two complaints so far are these: (1) the connecting power wire is extremely flimsy and probably will fail if handled much, or bumped the wrong way, and (2) it says that you cannot turn the unit off unless you activate the backup software included with it. Since I chose not to active the software, I guess that I cannot turn it off. That means that I will have to unplug it to take it offline. This is not only inconvenient, but will eventually lead to the connectors failing. I like having it offline between manual (drag and drop) back-ups to keep from having it hacked. Update on 05-08-2013 The 3TB data storage unit is still doing the job well, with no problems, after three months. I leave it on all of the time, although I do manual backups whenever I add or change something on my computer hard drive that I wish to back up. So far, I am still pleased with this product!

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.

Im using it as extra storage and backup for my triple-boot tower. It runs better in Linux than in Windows 7 IMHO, I plug it into a USB 2.0 slot and Ubuntu/Mint picks it right up. The backup mounts and saves to it with no problems. I only have USB 2.0 so Ill probably never get the full potential out of it. From what Ive seen it does slow down my system a bit when Im transporting files or trying to watch a video file from the drive. Its by no means a portable drive, so those who want to hook it up to a laptop may want to look elsewhere. This black brick is pretty much for back ups and extra storage on a sedentary PC. In case yall are curious as to what rig Ive hitched this drive to: MSI K9a2 Platinum, Athlon X2 6400+ BE w/ 4GB of PC8500 RAM.

I have this unit since 2011 and its still going strong. It remain invisible, hidden in a corner.. I dont see it, I dont hear it. I just noticed that I havent even removed the plastic film that it came protected in. For most part, external or internal HDDs run forever and one day, just die. There used to be a time when they would go noisy in their last moments but since 1995, most HDDs have outlived the system overall. I dont care about benchmarking the speed. I just need a reliable data storage to hold my 1700 movies and a small redundant backup of my research data. If you need something like that.. I dont see why you shouldnt buy this (price, aesthetics and personal preferences not being a factor). One thing I noticed was that the power adapter it came with, was not branded Western Digital. Its some generic American Power something brand which is weird because Ive had other externally powered HDD from WD and the power adapter clearly had the WD logo on it

The newest one, purchased recently, works fine with no issues except for the fact that my iMac would not recognize both the old and the new identical 3tb drives at the same time. I contacted support via email and they were most helpful, instructing me to change the name of the older one and that took care of the problem. My older one (perhaps a year old) has always worked fine with one nagging issue - whenever I reboot, it goes offline (disappears in Finder and Disk Utility). Whether its dismounting or ejecting, I dont know, but after rebooting I simply have to unplug it and plug it back in and then all is fine. A minor inconvenience - I have to do it every time I reboot. I have installed the latest firmware but that made no difference. I contacted support by email in connection with the above renaming issue and while they fixed that, they never responded to the dismounting problem. Still, Im reasonably satisfied with the products for the price. And I notice that Western Digitals support department has actually responded to some of the complaints in these reviews - I have never seen that by any manufacturers of any products, and I feel they are to be commended for that! Overall, Im giving my two drives an average rating of four stars.

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.

I have a home media center PC and have purchased several of these over the last couple years to store movies and tv shows. I always purchase them in pairs so I have one for the media center and one for backup. WD has changed the design slightly on this model compared to the 1TB & 2 TB model My Book. Those models had two blue LED lights on the front that would blink back and forth when data was being accessed. When the drive went into sleep mode the front would go dark and the lights off. This model has one micro white LED that is bright. It flashes when data is being accessed and continues to slowly pulse when the drive is asleep. A little disappointing in the asthtetics area that they changed this as I purchase this drive for looks almost as much as capacity. It also seems to take a bit longer to spin up and be ready when powering it on than the older models. I gave the bundled software 2 stars because it only came preloaded on the hard drive and not backed up on a disc. When I purchase a hard drive I dont feel anything at all should be on it. The first thing I did was format the drive but then I have to find a place to store the bundled software if I wanted to keep it. Otherwise, WD is a very solid product and I will continue to purchase. They cost a bit more than other brands but I feel you are paying for higher quality. USB 3.0 speeds were good. I purchased a seperate USB 3 card for my laptop but it also works fine at USB 2 speeds as well.