WD My Book Essential 2TB Desktop External Hard Drive WD My Book Essential 3TB Desktop External Hard Drive WD My Book Essential WDBACW0040HBK-NESN 4TB External Hard Drive WD My Book Essential 2TB Desktop External Hard Drive

Pros: good size decent speed

Cons: gets fairly warm when transfering very large files 200gb and more and vibrates a lot

Other Thoughts: got anoyed with the vibration so i put the drive in my desktop good drive when used as a secondary internal drive WD green 3TB no issues Will Keep buying WD Hard Drives

Pros: Works Great, Running it on Fully patched windows7 and on Ubuntu 12.0x

Cons: Heard some people were having issues getting it to run on older systems. (I haven't really tried)

Pros: USB 3.0
No heating
Solid

Cons: Nothing after one week..

Other Thoughts: Using it at NAS Driver (With my ASUS Router) with DLNA Support. Viewing video without problem. I use it for backup too, but not using the WD software..

Pros: This is a great drive. I hooked it to my wireless router to stream my entire collection of movies to my Blue-ray players. I bought this drive particularly because it’s the only drive I could find that would completely shut down when not in use, even while plugged into my router, other drives would continually run and get hot. This drive goes to sleep, no heat or wear and tear. When you call on it there’s a short lag before it fires up, perfectly understandable, it does exactly what I want.

Cons: Price

Other Thoughts: Super fast using the USB 3, makes me hate using my old drives.

Pros: ?? Doesn't work!

Cons: Defective product. My computer would not recognize the drive. It is currently being returned.

Other Thoughts: Disappointed that I had to pay for return shipping but shipping charges are being reversed after I complained.

Manufacturer Response:

We appreciate your feedback and apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced with the My Book Essential, as this is not the typical experience with the product. We are very sorry to hear that your drive did not function so soon after it was delivered. Western Digital does rigorously test and verify all of our drives, prior to shipping, with burn-in and diagnostic tests.
As a troubleshooting step it would be best to try connecting the drive to another computer to see if the issue persists.
To manually install the driver in Windows, please visit the following link.
WD SES driver download and instructions for recovering the WD SmartWare installer
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5419
We stand behind our warranty for the duration of the products provided warranty period, and as such, we are here to support our products regardless of the circumstances. We would like to assure you that what you have experienced is extremely abnormal. How to physically connect, disconnect, and install a WD external drive in a Windows PC or Mac http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5316 We would appreciate the opportunity to further assist you, and resolve any further concerns you may have with the device and/or your experience. You may contact us at 1 (800) 275-4932, or via our support website at: http://support.wdc.com/rs/. Please indicate within the online case creation or with the first support agent you speak with, that you are responding to a Newegg review, so we route you and your information to the correct team members.

Pros: Good size for storage space, acceptable physical size (not too big, evenly shaped).

Looks pretty nice for an enclosure, discrete.

USB 3.0.

Cons: First unit had major connectivity issues and disconnected repeatedly. Occasionally says the disk needs to be formatted after being plugged in.

Power button appears to be run via software; if it's not connected to the PC you can't power down the drive without pulling the cord.

It waits a while to install drivers every time I plug it in; time from plug-in to ready-to-go is pretty long compared to other external drives.

The backup software isn't amazing, but no worse than average, and it's free anyway.

Separate power cord (not sure you can avoid them with a 3TB drive).

Other Thoughts: Once it's plugged in and working *leave it plugged in*. The drive itself seems fine but it's connection is very fickle. but when it works it's just fine.

Pros: I have owned this HDD for about 3 years and it has served me well. Never had any problems.

Cons: It's kinda big and requires its own power source.

Pros: Fast, big

Cons: Causes OS to NOT start up upon reboot - took forever to diagnose - then fond lots of stuff online pointing to the same problems w WD hard drives

Manufacturer Response:

We appreciate your feedback and apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced with the My Book Essential 1 TB, as this is not the typical experience with the product.
Please note that this could be fixed by changing the Boot order from your computer BIOS. For more information follow the link below.
Problems booting a PC with an external USB drive connected
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1201
We would appreciate the opportunity to further assist you, and resolve any further concerns you may have with the device and/or your experience. You may contact us at 1 (800) 275-4932, or via our support website at: http://support.wdc.com/rs/. Please indicate within the online case creation or with the first support agent you speak with, that you are responding to a Newegg review, so we route you and your information to the correct team members.

Pros: Beautiful drive - functioned well - no problems there !

Cons: The unit failed to turn on (was flashing and then quit) & I assume it was an electrical failure and not the drive itself.

Other Thoughts: Since the drive contains about 2 TB of old data I am going to see if I can put the drive in an external enclosure and harvest my data. I realize this will invalidate my warranty but keeping my data is worth not getting a replacement unit from WD. I paid $150 for this unit and would have expected it to have lasted much longer than this one did. I have used WD internal drives doe years without any problems.

Manufacturer Response:

We appreciate your feedback and apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced with the My Book Essential, as this is not the typical experience with the product.
We would appreciate the opportunity to further assist you, and resolve any further concerns you may have with the device and/or your experience. You may contact us at 1 (800) 275-4932, or via our support website at: http://support.wdc.com/rs/. Please indicate within the online case creation or with the first support agent you speak with, that you are responding to a Newegg review, so we route you and your information to the correct team members.

Pros: Pretty much any hard drive will work fine for years & years as long as it's ntfs & not fat32. I've had this drive for about a year & had no problems since I reformatted to ntfs. I had it as fat32 for a while so it would be compatible with my tv and I lost data 4 times in 9 months. If your tv/ps3/xbox/etc requires a fat32 drive, just use your computer as a media player. I use a 35ft BlueRigger hdmi cable from my pc to my tv in another room.

Cons: none