Western Digital My Book Home Edition 500GB - USB 2.0 / Firewire 400 & eSata Hard drive
£63.61
Excellent Hard Drive for your Mac - I bought this My Book 1 TB hard drive about a week ago and it arrived within days of being ordered. Un packed it and had it working via the firewire connection in a matter of minutes. It is formatted to FAT32 which can be used by either Windows or Mac but I then re-formatted it Mac OS Extended (journaled) which is more better for use with a Mac only setup.The hard drive is the size of a small dictionary book and very quite even when reading or writing data from it. There is a cool indicator light on the front which swishes from side to side like on Knight Rider when in use. Also it indicates the how much storage is being used up when idle.I would highly recommend this to anyone who would like a decent external hard drive.
Esata Issues - Great drive but as in other reviews had to cut off some plastic on the esata cable to allow it to fully insert.once completed recognised straight away.the issue i have is during the boot process. when the drive is connected via esata. the boot sequance pauses for about 90 seconds twice. and the hard drive activity light on the computer seems to stay on nearly all the way through the boot and sometimes after.looking through the FAQ on the WD site it says its not compatable with certain esata chipsets! hence mine Marvell. now that was not shown on the specifications. now using via usb. should have bought the cheaper usb version.
Good external storage - I was in two minds wheather to buy this drive as there are a lot of bad reviews. I spoke to WD who told me that most units that are returned to them have damaged connectors and the disk itself is fine.At this price to get 500gb firewire & eSATA, I couldn t elp myself. The first unit arrived eventually. It looked good, lightweight. I pluged it into my laptop and started to reformat it to NTFS. After a short while there was a strong smell of scalectrix race cars and both pc and drive were dead! The laptop turned out fine as somehow the FAT had been damaged and didn t take 5 minutes to get working again but the drive was dead. A quick check showed it was the psu (which is a multi natitional fitting). Unfortunately I had to send the whole lot back. the new unit took over 5 weeks to be returned to me.It is now up and working fine. The transfer rates appear a little slow using usb and firewire. I was hoping for more from the firewire port as I bought it to store video files. eSATA is excellent. The only down side is my 2 laptops have to be rebooted to discounect when using eSATA although you can connect once hot.I wanted to use this on a NSLU2 as a network store when not transfering large files. Unfortunately it isn t recognised (even the small fat32 partition I left on) without mucking about in Linux.It should be noted that this is not a portable drive. The HD inside the unit is a standard WD unit which won t like to be moved when running.I don t use the software that is supplied as I already have a very good backup engine in my AV software.I would recommend this unit for normal in house use as long as it can stay in one place.If your putting essential data on it I would go for the double drive housing as the disks can be extracted without affecting warrenty (WD).
e-SATA Problems - A solution for Windows XP - Having read other reviewers comments regarding e-SATA problems, I was a bit worried about buying this hard disk. But I wanted the speed of e-SATA to back up my own Evesham computer, and USB 2.0 for my brother s backups.The disk worked fine on USB and Firewire, but my XP OS could not see the MyBook at all. I tried slicing off a millimeter or two from the body of the connector on the e-SATA cable to let it fully enter the socket on the MyBook case, as suggested by another reviewer. I d say it was a good way to slice your finger open, and it didn t do any good. On the Neowin forum I found a suggestion to refresh Device Manager. In short, this worked for me, so I am posting this review ASAP so others may benefit. The details are: With Mybook on, Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager > Action > Scan for hardware change. The Mybook then appeared in the Device Manager window. I had to re-boot a couple of times (with MyBook on), encountering the blank blue screen of death once or twice, but be patient and give it a little time before hitting the off switch.I ve only just got the disk up and running, and copied the files off it, so can t comment further on speed and so forth. I ll format it to NTFS next, which I would recommend. [Done now, took 4.5hours for a full format.]I don t think much of the WD doc. The Quick Install doesn t cover this procedure.
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!