Customer Reviews

Great drive, but defrag thoroughly and often
I've owned this drive for about five months at this writing, and use it to store all my video and music files (both mp3 and wav). And I still have 400GB of free space!

Its USB 2.0 interface is fast enough for video playback in a RAID 0 configuration (since it's actually two 1TB drives it can also be set RAID 1 to automatically back up everything you put on it).

It's a fairly small and very attractive package that doesn't get overly warm; if it has cooling fans inside I haven't heard them running yet. I much prefer its keyhole-shaped fluorescent-looking indicator light to the blinking bull's eye I've seen on older MyBook drives. Its up-and-down motion is actually kind of soothing.

Opening the box to replace a drive, if necessary, doesn't look too difficult if you're so inclined. It's quiet but not totally silent -- there's a soft clattering sound when it's working but I don't find it annoying and it's totally masked by movie audio or music.

One bit of advice, do NOT assume that Microsoft Vista's automatic "Defrag Lite" will do a good job on a drive this huge. I started to experience playback problems with recorded video and discovered that the drive was severely fragmented, even with Vista set to defrag it once a week. There's no easy way to analyze the drive for fragmentation with Vista defrag's dumbed-down user interface. And it would be great if WD included a defrag utility in its Drive Manager or Diagnostics Tool -- it doesn't. But there's freeware out there (Auslogics or JKDefrag) that will do a thorough job and, even better, actually show you what it's doing. So defrag this drive thoroughly and often, especially if you copy, move, delete and convert a lot of large video files.

It's not easy being green
I bought this product for it's simplicity and the mirror drive. The problem I have is it fails at providing the basics of what one would buy this product in the first place. The My Book I received is clearly defective but for obvious reasons. I was OK with the cheap plastic enclosure since I just plan to have it sit on the desk in a cool well ventilated spot. I like that it would do some power savings since I was not going to be using it all the time. I wanted a mirrored drive since drives fail and even if I can rebuild the data I rather spend the extra now so I would not have to. I am sending my drive back it is defective but I learned something in the process that I can share.
First the product is about the enclosure. Mirror drives Raid 1. I did not have anything fancy planned for this drive. All I needed was a USB connection and to format it for my MAC. No problem. The problem I encountered was the drive kept dismountnig. It would drop on writes and reads. There is no mention of this on WD's knowledge base or help. I checked the forums and there are many accounts of people having the same problem. Some say remove the software, update software, update bios, others say that does not help. I read it happening to both windows and mac users. The claim is the power saving feature causes the drive to go to sleep and unmount. I tried the power button on the back to wake it up but it did not do anything. I pull the plug and re power the device. drive came back. In playing with it I experienced a wide variety of behaviors.
-press button and I have no idea what the button is for.
-Ah when working properly the button wakes it up.
-It does not matter if the drive is in use it will go to sleep.
-setting everything in the OS not to sleep makes no difference.
-The power light flickers when I plug it in and then no light
-update bios not change, new drive manager software no change
-No software still dismounts
Basically it is this the the controller that has the power conector and the USB is incredibly cheap. It seems prone to having problems and WD is not being straight up about this. Out of all the parts of the enclose to be sturdy and reliable it is this component. It would be a better choice to buy two separate drives then this one. For me the main point was to have a nice neat package with one power cord and one box with mirrored drives. This is defeated by making the one critical part a liability above the drives failing. I only wish they took the time and money for the fancy flashing light and put it into making the power and USB component better quality.

MyBook for Disaster Recovery
I've only had the product just 1 month so it's a little premature to review now, however I will say that so far it has been easy to put into place and seems to be working fine. I tried to defragment using regular Windows Defragmenter but it would not work. I then asked for suggestions/recomendations on what third party defragmenter has been tested to work on this device and was informed that they could not recommend any due to potential liabilites. If this is the case I think they should have tested this using Windows defrag and ensured that it would work. Other than that I am happy with it but would very much like to defrag it.