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272 of 288 found the following review helpful:
 Yes it works with power strips, Yes it can be shared on a network!! Oct 14, 2006
By J. Sundquist
I've been using this drive for about a month now. BUY IT! I don't know if there are some defective drives out there or what but several of the negative claims sounded very odd to me. The first thing I did when I got the drive was to plug it into a power strip.. It came right up.
Next, since I'm running a home network with several computers and a wireless laptop, I shared out the drive on my network. It worked like a champ. I can read and write data to it without a problem. Here are the steps you should use to properly share a drive in Windows XP:
1. On the computer you're sharing, open My Computer.
2. Right-click the hard drive you want to share and choose Sharing and Security from the shortcut menu that appears.
The Sharing tab appears, displaying a message that warns you that sharing a drive isn't a good idea. Beneath the message is a link that you can click to indicate that you understand the risk but want to share the drive. Then the Sharing tab changes to reveal the options that allow you to share the drive.
3. Select the Share This Folder on the Network option.
4. Enter a name for the share.
5. Select the Allow Network Users to Change My Files option.
If you don't select this option, network users can view files but can't create new files or modify existing files. Because you're a network user when you want to work on a file on this computer from a different computer, there's not much point in restricting what network users can do. However, the security in Windows XP is rather complicated, and it gets more complicated when you share folders.
6. Click OK.
Now, to access your new share on another computer you'll need two pieces of info: the name of your computer with the drive and the name of the share you just created. To find your computer name, right click on "My Computer" and choose Properties. Click on the "Computer Name" tab. In the middle of the page you'll see "Full computer name:" followed by your full computer name. If there is a dot after the computer name, you can ignore it. Write down your computer name and the name of the share you just created and head over to one of your network machines that you'd like to access the drive on.
Right click on "My Computer" and choose "Map Network Drive". A window with two fields will come up "Drive" and Folder" and a check box "Reconnect at logon".
In the Drive box, pick the drive letter you want the drive to have in My Computer. In the folder box, type the following using the name of your computer with the drive and the name of the share you created:
\\computername\sharename
Where computername is the computer you hooked up the shared mybook to and sharename is the name of the share you created.
If you want the computer to automatically reconnect to the share every time it reboots, you can check the reconnect at logon box.
Just click Finish and you're done!
Now, back to the My Book 500gb Premium Edition. I find it to be very quiet and unobtrusive. It has two blue rings around the power button that light up. The outside ring is a power and drive activity light that will flash and move when you are reading or writing data to the drive. The inside ring is actually a drive capacity light that tells you how much room is left on the drive! If your drive is half full, the half of the inside ring will be lit!
The center of the two rings is a power button. It shuts the drive completely off. One thing to note on this: when using the included backup software, you can (and should) schedule your backups to run automatically at regular times. If you power off the drive by pushing the middle power button, the drive cannot power itself back up automatically to complete your backup.
I have found that you don't really need to power off the drive anyway as it will slow itself down and go to a standby mode if it isn't accessed for a long time. The power stays on and the blue rings stay lit, but it does go into a power save mode. It will wake back up right away when you want to access it.
The drive also monitors the pc and knows when you turn off your computer. It automatically turns itself off when your pc is off and back on when your pc is turned back on! This is actually a big deal as most of the "do it yourself" external drive kits have a hard power button and the thing will be on until you manually turn it off.
There are 3 different flavors of this drive. The Essential Edition pretty much comes with the drive with USB connectivity and that's it. This works fine for a lot of people.
The Premium Edition comes with the drive, USB and Firewire connectivity and software for your computer including a backup program that is so easy that your grand parents can use it as well as google desktop search to help you find files on your computer just as easy as googling things on the web.
The Pro Edition is identical to the Premium except that it comes with a faster Firewire port for those who need it and it is white instead of black (Probably to match Apple Computers since those are the most likely ones to use a faster Firewire port).
I find that the drive does not get hot at all. If you put your hand on the vents on the top of the drive it will be warm, but that's it. I'm not worried about heat build up on this drive.
Installation:
The software that is included in the Premium Edition is actually on the hard drive itself and once you attach the drive to the computer and power it on, the drive will be recognized and installed by windows and the software install screen will usually pop up automatically. If for some reason this doesn't come up automatically, you can open My Computer, click on the new drive letter and click on the "autorun" file. This should make the software run. Just follow a basic simple install choosing whether you want to install the backup software and google optional pieces and your done.
As for speed, I haven't done any scientific benchmarks, but I've copied a few 4 gig test files back and forth and I'm quite happy with the speed.
In conclusion, the drive works, requires no maintenance, setup is a breeze and it looks cool on top of it all. Also, people complained that you can't plug it into a power strip, I did not have that problem, people said you can't network it, I was able to network it easily.
One more note. People need to realize the tech support terminology can be misleading. When you call tech support and say you're having trouble networking the my book drive, if they tell you that networking is not supported, that does NOT mean that you can't do it, it just means that tech support doesn't think that is a problem with the drive so they won't spend the time to tell you how to do it. If you are trying to figure out how to do something try doing a search with google or A9.com like "how to share a drive in windows xp". You'd be suprised at the things you'll learn!
74 of 77 found the following review helpful:
Extremely simple to set up Jun 04, 2006
By Steve Frazier
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.
61 of 65 found the following review helpful:
 Unbelievably Unstable Feb 17, 2007
By Ren Walker
I have owned and loved Western Digital products for many years. Unfortunately, they should have remained in the IDE and EIDE market and stayed out of the USB market, at least until they figured out how USB works.
I installed this product several weeks back and was hoping I could make the quirks, kinks, and overall instabilities go away, since I've been a huge Western Digital fan for many years. Alas, this is not possible. And my e-mails on their support site go unanswered. I simply get automatic e-mails, telling me that I need to try solutions that I've already tried...several times.
I've downloaded and updated the latest of every piece of software and every driver available and unfortunately, this wonderfully huge hard drive, that I would love to depend on, simply goes into la-la land at least once a day. At first, it appears in Windows Explorer to be there, but clicking on this drive will do little more than attempt to make me believe there is nothing on it, even though I have put over 100 GB of files onto it. That is, the content portion of the Explorer is simply blank. I reboot countless times to no avail. When I reboot, the drive simply shows the same results -- no data at all -- or the drive doesn't appear at all. When it doesn't appear in Explorer at all, I go into the Device Manager to find an "Unknown device". Uninstalling it and re-installing does little more than cause more frustration.
I know I should probably try the Firewire interface. However, I spent a lot of money to buy this drive; buying more hardware to, hopefully, simply satiate the needs of this particular piece of hardware, doesn't make fiscal sense to me.
I'm sorry, Western Digital, to give you a bad review, but please please please figure out how USB interfaces function before you produce another drive available and tarnish your good name any further. At this time, I can't even get my data off of your drive and I won't return it until I figure out how to do so. I will probably have to spend more money to figure out how to erase the information, simply so I can return it. We depend on companies like you to hold our valuable, personal information. This experience has been a very sour, disappointing let-down.
29 of 30 found the following review helpful:
The good, the bad, and the ... really bad Apr 13, 2007
By La Callas
"MC"
I've often wondered how many people review things on amazon when they first buy them. Had I done so, i'd have posted only the good, and would have forgotten by the time it got really bad.
The good:
When I first purchased 2 of these, my first run to a customer went fantastically well. I copied the files via windows explorer to the drive, which showed up in My Computer under windows, as you'd expect, and presto, no problems.
The bad:
- Sometimes the drive won't turn off by the power button on the front. Sometimes it will. It's like my 2 year old child. It's got an unreasonable and emotionally uncontrollable reaction to what you do.
- Customer support is crazy. Crazy! I spent a long long time explaining my problem, what i'd done to solve it, the steps I took and provided a screen shot - only to wait a day and get an automated response - which had nothing to do with the problem, and i'd already reviewed prior to submitting the question because they force you to - and the "person" who responded proceeded to provide feedback and steps that did not address the issue, solve the problem or leave me with the impression that he understood what he was doing.
- The first backup performed with their software took overnight - that's fine, it really was 300GB of uncompressed data on a windows drive - but when it was done, it wasn't - their backup software puts it's own "restore" binaries in the directory you created at backup time - and for this one, it didn't. It seems the backup software is unable to backup when you input over 50GB of data at a go. The workaround, though, is to break it up into smaller chunks. PITA when you have a system for "filing" within your windows directories, but livable considering the bigger PITA to backup to DVD :)
- The drive makes not so nice sounds when shutting down. Yes, it's a known "issue" - they say it's not an issue, but when you shell out a lot of money on your drive, your heart stops for a moment when you hear a painful clicking sound. You know, the sound your drive makes a day or two before it stops working. Yup, it's that one. For what it's worth, i've had the drives on for roughly a month without a problem - but you should be aware that it'll be a little strange the first time you hear it.
The really bad:
- The backup software refuses to work. The problem I have is that it wasn't predictable in how it chose to .. stop working. I installed the drive, did a backup. That overnight backup. Which failed. The next morning I did the backup in smaller chunks and when i came back from work, sure enough it was fine. Great. I performed more backups over the course of a week. No problems. Last week I launched the software, selected the folders i wanted to backup, even selected the files - and the software insists on telling me "Please select the files to be backed up". Nothing changes this message. I'd removed the drivers/software, rebooted, reinstalled, uninstalled just the backup software, reinstalled - it doesn't matter - it just simply refuses to work.
- The diagnostic tool that their website and their techical support people will tell you to use is useless. When you launch it, it does a SmartScan - which, if things are fine, it says "Pass" and you think "great". The problem is when it says "Info unavailable" - what does that mean? You check the help files, right? There's nothing in there that mentions what it means - or mentions it at all. So I reviewed the responses I got from technical support - which provided me a link - and the information in the link simply reiterated their software help info - which was useless. I'm a self service junkie. I don't want to call you. I don't want to email you. If I have a problem, I want to read the manual, or your website, or your forum. While I don't really believe i'm the first to have a problem with their backup software, I absolutely refuse to believe i must have been the first one to ask what "info unavailable" means. Help me help you help me! :)
I think for me the issue is now trust. I think the data on the HD is fine - but considering the application stopped working out of the blue - who's to say the application in each directory I made a backup of on this drive won't stop working too? It works today, but there's no telling if it'll work tomorrow. Yes, I could manually copy the files - but when you're backing up 2TB of data, incremental backups really are the way to go. Another potential workaround is to purchase another vendor's backup software. Which i've done, and not yet tried - but this is wholly not the point. Don't shlep cheap and buggy software off, charge $25 more than the version of the product without it, and market it as "backup software that provides the world in gold" - that's just wrong. And frustrating.
As a result, I won't be buying this drive again. I highly recommend you don't either. There are plenty of competing products on the market already, and if you're going to buy someone else's backup software - you might as well buy a hard drive from a vendor that invests in competent online and software support. After all, as of today, what were you spending that extra $25 on?
46 of 51 found the following review helpful:
A great and simple to use external May 04, 2006
By D. Peterson
I had this 500GB MyBook up and running about 60 seconds out of the box. Took me longer to push the plug into my UPS than the computer took to mount it as a drive!
For compatibility reasons the drives all come formatted in FAT32. To use for video editing, which is why I bought it, I had to re-format it to NTSF. the reformat that took only a minute or two and I was off and running.
Great drive, brainlessly simple to install and use.
Sorry I can't comment on the backup software but I only use this for Video and photo and I have an NAS for all backup.
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