Western Digital My Book Essential 1.5TB Desktop External Hard Drive

Pros: None

Cons: i always used WD products in the past but this 1.5tb was garbage. I lost over 10 years of music, movies, pics and software, that i cannot recover unless i spend a lot of money to have it professionally recovered. The use the green HDD in these external backups which is horrible. DO NOT BUY !!!!!

Manufacturer Response:

We appreciate your feedback and apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced with the My Book Essential 1.5TB, 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. 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.
We would appreciate the opportunity to further assist you, and resolve any further concerns you may have with the device and/or your experience, while resolving this particular issue for you. 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: * Very reliable * great value (size vs. price) * USB 3.0 * quiet * Great Newegg service

I own 2 of these WD 1.5TB drives and both work perfectly. Connected via USB 3.0, they fly along, but even at USB 2.0 fairly quick transfer rates on a modern PC.

Cons: None I have found

Other Thoughts: I admit that I do not use the included WD "bloatware", I format all my drives when I install them, and use my preferred backup software if needed. I've noticed a lot of negative reviews on other various WD HDD products, complaining of mechanical failures or DOA's after a short time, but I have NEVER had any failures of my WD drives in 10+ years of owning different WD models (ranging from 40-80GB internals to 120GB, 750GB, and 1.5+TB external models). So I don't know what these reviewers are actually doing to their drives (using them as hockey pucks maybe?), but for me there has never been any problems.

Pros: My other review was edited VERY poorly and I wanted to write another one that corrected those mistakes.

This drive does exactly the things I thought it would do when I saw that it reached my price point. I have a large music collection that is only getting larger. I needed a large, fast drive so I could add large amounts of music quickly. This drive does exactly that. Its very quick and has a lot of space. Glad I picked it up when I did. Its much faster than my older one gb external drive I have here at home. I also use it to temporarily store user profiles when I re-image/replace PCs. Some of those profiles are very big and again, this is where the speed of USB 3.0 comes in.

Currently I am very happy with this purchase and I will buy another one, its just not in my price range right now. No complaints.

Cons: I don't have any cons as of now, other then price but hey its popular right now.

Other Thoughts: This drive has a good price/size ratio. Traditionally I have not had a great track record with external storage which is why this external drive is not my only form of back up anymore. Redundancy is the way to go for that.

Pros: Fast, USB 3, Size, Price

Cons: None so far

Other Thoughts: I bought this because of the price and the fact that it was USB 3 and was pretty big. I was waiting for one to reach my price point for a 1 TB drive for a while, this one finally did. I bought this for backups at work and for my large music collection which is 90 gb's and growing. The drive copies files at a clip of 17 MB's per second from my USB 3 drive so transfers are a breeze. There is no lag when do doing my back ups either. Works great for what I am using it for. I would by another in a heartbeat and probably will in the future.

Yes, I have found it a worthy purchase so far. The complaint about it here I found to be unfounded as its pretty quick.

Pros: usb 3.0, western digital and new egg cost! 1.5 TB, usb 3.0 for under $100. awesome deal... every hard drive I own is WD. hard drives are not something that you want failing.... having an external back up that i can pop into a safe when i travel pays for itself

Cons: the reason it's 'slow' is because you have it plugged into a usb 2.0 jack and not a 3.0 jack... go buy a $20 usb 3.0 card and plug it into that and you'll have super-fast data transfer!

Pros: Looks nice, silent, cool..

Cons: SLOOOOW...!

1gb per MINUTE..

Other Thoughts: I have this plugged into the back of my Synology DS212j..

I have 678gb of stuff on the syn, takes 22hours to back up to this drive..

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. The My Book Essential has a USB 3.0 interface connection, which the standard transfer speed for this device is roughly 20 to 50 MB/s. Transferring 678 GB of information in 22 hours translates to 30.8 MB/s, or 1.848 GB/minute. It will definitely take a bit of time to backup 678 GB of information, however to ensure the fastest transfer speeds, ensure that your device has the latest firmware, and that your systems have the most up to date vendor patches and that your computer(s) has the drivers installed for the drive, as these updates could increase transfer speeds. Please refer to the following link for more information on how to update the firmware of your device.
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5819.
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.