HARD DRIVE, 500GB MYBOOK COMBO EXT
by WESTERN DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES
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List Price: Category: CE See more product details |
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Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of HARD DRIVE, 500GB MYBOOK COMBO EXT
Customer Review: For Mac Users: Works well after format.
Summary: 5 Stars
This drive is a solid feeling drive with fast read and write. It is quiet and runs cool with good ventilation around the edge to keep it cool and therefore have a long life. The drive is also quite quiet. The case is rugged, made of a sturdy plastic, and edged with a rubber rim. The package looks nicer than the pictures portray. It also can be stacked with additional units for really massive storage requirements.
If you have a Mac system: the drive should be reformatted to make it compatible with the Mac OS X operating system. To do this open up Disk Utility, a program found in utilities. With the drive plugged in the firewire port you will see the drive. (You might have to press the button on the front of the drive which is in the center of the big blue rings to wake it up if you remove and reattach it.) Select the Partition tabs and then create your partitions. In particular, create at least two partitions. One will be for the Time Machine backup utility. Make it about 20% larger than your computer's drive plus other partitions you want Time Machine to back up. On my system I have a Time Machine partition, a partition to back up work files over the internet, and another volume for scratch mass storage. Time Machine is set up to only back up the main disk. The scratch disk will be used for temporary use in video editing projects.
Setting up this way allows a full partition to be allocated to Time Machine (which time machine needs), have additional volumes as you need, and allows you to decide which of those partitions you want automatic backups done through Time Machine.
Recommended.
Customer Review: Step up to efficient back-ups
Summary: 5 Stars
The very first thing that got my eye when considering to purchase the WD is that I'd no longer need to make back-ups on disc. Now I don't!. The book does the job of over a 100 DVDs and all your data is in one attractive looking book shaped storage unit. I use windows xp which acknowledges immediately when another piece of hardware is detected. Once XP sees the unit plugged up be it firewire or usb, it tells you and ask if you want to install the WD software which is on the WD itself. You don't have to unless you really what to see the extra bells and whistle. If you don't install the software the WD appears like a new drive seen from your windows explorer folder. You can create a new folder as easy as you would in XP... then either drag or copy your valuable data to your new folder in the WD... I plan on getting a couple more. It is a sturdy compact piece of machinery that the average person would mistake for a book. In fact I keep my on my bookshelf with my books. So for me if you're running XP this is the way to go. The only way I could see this product getting better is that they'd increase the hard drive size. But for now the 500 GB is excellent for my needs. Good job Western Digital! I think you've found your strength!Customer Review: Works Perfectly
Summary: 5 Stars
I've had this for about two months now and I've been using it as a DVR expander. I already have about 300 gb used and been watching programming from it frequently.
Here's a piece of advice. I saw a great deal on a Monster USB cord. Now, I think Monster makes some fantastic products, but they can be overpriced. The Monster cable I got was on clearance, so I said what the heck.
I switched out the cable that came with the hard drive with the Monster and the performance vastly improved. Before using the Monster cable, my cable box sometimes did not recognize the hard drive and I had to reset it by un/plugging the hard drive. With the Monster USB cable, my cable box recognizes my hard drive every time and recognizes very quickly.
I wouldn't say go out and buy a $25 USB cable, but maybe $7 could be a worthwhile investment.
Back to the hard drive. I really like the on/off switch. This is important for Dish owners intending to use it as an expander. The Dish DVR is always "on" even when you turn it off. Many HD's turn on and off through recognizing when the computer turns off. This won't work with the Dish DVR.
Customer Review: Mine works with powerstrip
Summary: 5 Stars
I was scared when I read that this drive does not work with powerstrip. But I went ahead and opened the box anyway and plugged mybook into a powerstrip. It worked!! I also tried to plug it into UPS, and it worked on UPS too. Mine was bought from CC.
Another nice feature of this drive is that the drive spins down after a period of inactivity. I think it spin down after about 10 minutes. Ofcourse if powers off when you put your computer on standby, as advertised. The spin down feature was very important for me since I plan to use this drive on SimpleShare NAS (Network Attached Storage). The drive inside SimpleShare has capacity to spin down on it's own but SimpleShare cannot spin down USB drives attached to it. By the way, for the nossy ones: I plan to use MyBook with SimpleShare as RAID 1 (Mirrored) drive. No more manual backups for me.
Mind you everyone using external USB drives: If the drive does not spin down and keeps spinning all the time then you are going to see a dead drive in 1-2 years with all your precious data lost.
Other features are very well reviewd by fellow users.
Customer Review: Extremely simple to set up
Summary: 5 Stars
After a distressing hard drive failure a couple of years ago, I've been hyper about backups (and backups of my backups...) for home data. I recently purchased this to backup my music and photo files and so far it's been great. It is extremely easy to set up; you plug it in, load the software, ask it to update your music and photo files, and off it goes. For me, the first backup of 80GB of music and photos took about 90 minutes.
It's also an extremely rugged piece -- a nice solid metal case that is heavy enough to stay put on your desktop (I have an older, lighter firewire drive that is always getting pushed around...this WD drive is definitely going to stay put where it is).
The only thing I don't like about it is that the documentation is pretty skimpy, and the WD website didn't seem to have a lot about this hard drive on it. I guess if I have no problems with it I won't miss the documentation, but I would feel better if there were a little more information readily available.