WD My Book Essential 500GB USB 2.0 3.5" External Hard Drive WDG1U5000N

Pros: Good looking enclosure. Basically silent. Turns on and off automatically with windows. Plenty of space. Doesn't seem to overheat at all.

Cons: Seems a little slow. Not ultra-slow, but when copying large files it seems to take somewhat noticeably longer than my previous external drive. The drive inside turns off after a period of idleness which causes a delay when accessing it again.

Overall Review: Comes pre-formatted to FAT32 for compatablity. If you're running Windows XP converting it to NTFS is reccomended and doesn't take much effort. Control Panel > Admin Tools > Computer Managment > Storage > Disk Managment. Right click the drive and format. Due to it's size, I'd recommend a quick format. All the full format does is search for bad sectors on the disk and recover/disable them. I'll probably buy another of these for its looks and quietness when I need more storage.

Pros: Works as advertised, truly "plug-n-play" - no drivers to load, nothing to mess around with. XP recognizes it off the bat and you're good to go. Linux Defender mounted it no problem, BartPE picks it up too (great for a recepticle in data recovery). Power cord is longer than average, plus the plug is standard size (the adapter is inline) so it doesn't hog up a bunch of space at the outlet. The auto on/off works with both my laptop and tower. It's much smaller than I expected from the photos, about as tall as a dollar bill. Runs very quiet and cool - after 2.5hrs of nonstop data transfer it was barely warm. My mp3's don't 'skip' when I play them from the drive (like one reviewer noted). I'm only using this drive as backup, but wanted to try it anyway. Maybe he's only using usb1? Maybe try defragging? USB2 is great. My tower didn't have USB2, so I bought one of these http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16815124002 at the same time and still spent less than what

Cons: The drive worked initially, but then suddenly and seemingly without reason stopped working. XP would only recognize a "USB Device" and then launch the driver wizard. XP SP2 had no driver for it, and neither did WD's site (that I could find). I did an internet search and found a posting where someone had my exact problem, called WD and was told to plug it into the wall directly. BINGO! As soon as I did that it was recognized again; and come to think of it I *had* plugged more stuff into that power strip when the drive quit working. I experimented a bit, and I could reproduce the problem by plugging it into a power strip with lots of other devices, and the problem went away as soon as I plugged it in by itself or on a less crowded power strip. I hope the other reviewers that had this problem had a chance to try this before returning a perfectly good drive.

Overall Review: There is some "spin-up" time once you access the drive after a period of inactivity, but it's not all that bad. I found some software on WD's site that lets you customize this drive (front button operation, time to spin-down, etc...). The included Google software is nothing to write home about. Had to format to NTFS, but that's no big deal - takes less than a minute (WD has a walkthrough for this in the support documentation if you don't know how to do it). Overall a fantastic purchase - I will be buying more. Kinda bummed that newegg dropped the price 2 days after I bought this one.

Pros: Large storage capacity, Quiet, Uniform size

Cons: Uncontrollable shutdown, overly cheap construction

Overall Review: Over the last year, I've purchased 5 of these units (just ordered the 5th one today). When I originally started my home theater PC project, I knew I'd need to find a brand of external hard drive that maintained a uniform enclosure size and port configuration. I didn't want to buy ALL my drives up front, and at once. I wanted to buy them over the period of a year or two, but still have the same enclosure size and configuration due to a special media rack I built. I haven't had a single failure yet [knock on wood].

Pros: Low power, fairly fast, and powers off with the computer.

Cons: none.

Overall Review: this drive keeps itself cool. it is fairly fast and very easy to set up. I use it in my truck with my Kenwood cd player w/ usb port ... works great!

Pros: I have owned a 400 GB for a few months and I just purchase a 500 GB yesterday. First of all my deepest respects to NewEggs for delivering in 1 day (I paid for 3 days) the drive. You guys are spoiling us! The drive performs well and is so easy to install (win2k and xp). It is quite and fits well on the desk next to the monitor. Nice that it will start and stop when the computer does (but you can stop it whenever you want). The green ring is a discreet reminder that the drive is on.I like the fact that I can stack them and will not need to go fishing behind it to find the switch. It comes with its own USB cable.

Cons: I wish it had 2 USB ports to chain link more drives without having to use a hub. Why not an internal transformer? It is a bit slow at waking up, but I am glad that it cycles down to save energy and lifespan.

Overall Review: Newegg has the lowest price in town (As far as I can see) and great service.

Pros: This (I have the 500GB) is a very nice external HDD. Very responsive when you need to put something on it, it loads up fast. The actual GB was not off that much like most HDDs either (Reads XXX/465GB). 465GB out of 500 is not that bad for an external. They give you useful softwares as well. I find myself using the imaging software (Picasa 2) quite often actually.

Cons: None that I have found.

Overall Review: I leave it running all of the time and it has been a year now (I think). No signs of letting up and it runs fairly cool.

Pros: Good storage GB/per$, nice form factor (subjective I suppose).

Cons: Very slow compared to other external USB drives, throughtput is approximately 60% of that of Mxxxor and Buslink devices I own. They tent to "forget" their on/off state, which is supposed to be automatic.

Overall Review: I purchased 2 of the 500GB drives, to compliment my already large assortment of Mxxxor and Bxxxink devices. Both devices worked properly upon installation. Upon initial setup, I tested bandwidth and found both devices almost identical to each other (a good thing), but could only achieve approx. 60% of the throughput of my other external USB drives. In fact, data transfer on these devices is only about 15% faster than my Mxxxor "network shared storage" drives (400GB each, connected via 10/100 ethernet). Large backups consistently take almost twice as long on the WD than on any of my other USB drives (24 total), and 4 times longer than my fastest USB drives. My other "complaint" - and not a big deal - is that they seem to run unusually hot, and their little external power adapters run *really* hot, which I believe will shorten their life span. I've already contacted WD about purchasing a couple spare power adapters, as I believe the drives will outlive the adapters.

Pros: The HDD has a small, sleak exterior that is not obtrusive. It runs quiet and cool. I run WinXP/SP2 and setup was non existant, just plug and play. The USB 2.0 connection makes tranfering files very quick. And, as usual Newegg shipping was fantastic. I ordered it on a friday morning and with default shipping I received it that following monday.

Cons: The HDD does come formatted as FAT32, which I'm not very fond of. So, the first thing I had to do before I could start using it was to reformat it to NFTS. Since, this HDD is a 500g monster (actually it's more like 465g) it took about an hour or so. Other than that, this I have no problems with this drive what so ever.