Electronics : Western Digital My Book Home Edition 1TB USB 2.0 Firewire & eSata External Hard Drive

Rating: - eSATA connectivity
Not terribly impressed with this drive!

Bought primarily to back up my photographic work with speed. The eSATA connection sold it to me, only to find it will not work on Vista x64 SP1. Not that i could find out straight away, as there wasn't even an eSATA lead, come on WD, what's the deal??

Products like this that fail to work 'out of the box' deserve to be slated for the waste of time they really are. Very poor!

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Rating: - Beware of ESATA cables and compatibility
I bought this product as a backup device to my PC. My main connection was to be ESATA due to increased bandwidth performance, but despite speaking WD support I never did get this to work with my Dell XPS 420 PC. All my drivers were upto date, but the PC would not recognise the WD My book at all. On inspection the connection at the back of the drive, although ESATA, seems slightly larger than the ESATA on my other devices, bizarrely the WD support team reccd cutting a couple of mm off my ESATA cable, so that it would sit properly, it never did, I ruined my cable (now none-returnable) and have had to return this drive to Amazon. WD say they have about a 50% success rate with ESATA, and the support from WD, although very friendly, was not helpful in resolving this. I am now forced to source another product which is a shame as the product looks great, it just didnt do its job for me, although I hear they work very well with USB and firewire, albeit at a slower transfer rate.

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Rating: - Mac/Firewire problem
As other's have mentioned, the drive's Firewire 400 connection doesn't function. (I am using an aluminium iMac)
There's nothing wrong with my firewire port - works fine with other devices. The drive passes power through when daisy chaining, but nothing else. It just gets stuck in a continuous power on/power off loop. Why pay for the FW if it's not even gonna work?

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Rating: - Blew up within 2 days
I got the My Book to do a back up of my Mac. I plugged it in and it linked up fine and started doing a backup faultlessly. The next evening it was making a little more noise than normal and I realised it was no longer in communication with the Mac.
I phoned the Western Digital help desk 3 times. They were helpful but they could have made their instructions a little easier to follow. On the third phone call they did admit there didn't seem to be anything they could do, particularly as the Mac remained out of contact with the My Book. So off the disc went back to Amazons suppliers with everything my Mac contained aboard. The next day I spent several hours changing passwords with all those companies on the web that I visited. Definitely not reliable.

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Rating: - Good external hard drive, but firewire is slow
I wanted a large external hard drive for music backup / processing with a laptop that was top spec in 2006 and has a firewire port (Asus W3V). I got this version because I thought Firewire 400 would be faster than USB. I was wrong! A test transfer of 1.53 GB took 140 seconds with USB 2.0 and 180 seconds with Firewire.

Even so, I have decided to keep this, rather than send it back for a cheaper USB only model, mainly because the collapse in the exchange rate means that I got the drive for what is now a good price. Also I might want eSata in the future e.g. if I buy another desktop.

More generally: as others have said the drive is whisper quiet. I have not used the back-up software, which seems to be the reason some have given negative reviews.