Customer Reviews

What in the hell is wrong with Western Digital
If you are just looking to add an additional drive for storage, don't buy this new version of My Book Essential. Especially if you plan to buy more than one (which you of course should unless it's purely a backup drive). You will regret it unless you are a newbie who only wants a drive that will back up your system (and even then you should get a Seagate now instead).

Western Digital is now installing a "virtual drive" software that CANNOT be disabled, ejected (unmounted) or deleted. You will have an extra drive entry for each one of these you install. If you use up to 8 drives, as I have, that would mean 16 separate drive entries. WD has flat out said you cannot remove this functionality. Even reformating won't do it, because the included software is in firmware. If you do use the backup and security functions, they are part of this software, and your drive capacity will ONLY be about 770GB, not the full 930GB that is normal (you can still access the drive directly via another drive letter for full capacity). The software that comes on these drives is not professional level backup software. Neither is the security software. If you are serious about protecting your data, you will buy pro-level software anyway. But you are apparently forever stuck with this software on these drives.

Western Digital's drives have about the same reliability as the Seagates. Both make external drives that aren't fan-cooled, so weaker components from the manufacturing process fail, requiring these types of units to be replaced frequently (that's why you never buy only one, or never keep your only copy of data on it). That's just part of owning these drives for most people. Seagate will replace your drive for free for 5 YEARS. WD will do the same for 1 YEAR. It is virtually guaranteed that 1 or 2 drives out of 10 of these will require replacement. I prefer to have 5 years to do so rather than 1.

I've bought 12 external USB drives, both brands. More of the Seagates than the WD's. I just returned two of these I bought yesterday, and from this point on, there will be no more WD's coming home with me, having discovered that I cannot remove WD Smartware. With the Seagates, I plug it in, the computer sees it as a DRIVE, not software. I delete the software that Seagate puts on the drive, and I start using it. That's how I want it to be.

Meant for the most basic of users only
Update (as of 10/11/09)
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Instead of returning the drive I thought I would do a favor for a somewhat computer-illiterate friend by selling her the drive along with assisting her in installing and configuring the SmartWare software to backup her data.

The laptop running WD Smartware is about three years old and contains a single-core chip. Well, I discovered that this software is a resource PIG. WD advertises the fact that SmartWare is always running in the background to backup any files the moment they changes. The trade-off is that the SmartWare background service routinely spikes the CPU to 95%-100%, bringing a single core Windows computer to its knees. It's just not worth it.

In the end I uninstalled Smartware completely from the laptop (the 1TB drive is still accessible despite the Windows XP Device manager complaining of an unknown device) and built a backup job that runs daily using the free Comodo Backup software.

WD SmartWare is not even good for newbies unless they have current, multicore computers able to handle the hour-by-hour spike in CPU usage from this service. In my opinion WD really stumbled with this product.


Summary (original review)
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In my opinion this device is not meant for any but the most limited-skilled computer user. The few dumbed-down options that cannot be deactivated in their included software combined with the instability of the current device driver (at least for Win7) makes this drive too inflexible and unreliable for anyone looking for an external hard drive to store data and backups from their own, proven backup strategies.


Background
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As an owner of the previous generation 1TB and 500GB MyBook Essential external drives, I needed another 1TB drive to store rolling backups of my OS partition images, my digital media (stills, videos, and MP3s), and software install DVD/CD ISOs. I turned to this drive based on a) my previous good experience with the MyBook models, and b) the hopeful fact that this drive was an improvement in reliability, speed, and power consumption since it was a next-generation of the models I currently have.

As an advanced computer user who developed several automated backup and drive imaging jobs using other, more robust backup solutions I did not need the WD SmartWare backup software that comes with this drive. I would soon learn that this drive does not operate properly without out the WD SmartWare software installed, nor did it operate reliably with the software installed.


WD Smartware
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The WD Smartware is meant to be an all-in-one console for managing the drive settings and health, as well as managing backup/restore jobs. I didn't like the fact that upon creating a backup job that this software was constantly running behind the scenes and backing up every changed file in my backup set immediately after the files changed. This is backup-overkill, in my opinion, but I certainly understand that there are computer users who don't fully grasp the concept of backing up data - again, for this user category WD SmartWare will simplify implementing recurrent backups.

Since the price was within USD $1.00 of the previous generation model I assumed I could purchase this drive and use it without having to install the WD SmartWare software - I was wrong and I am regretting this purchase, for now I have to return it and either purchase the previous generation or another brand.


Cons
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1) As pointed out by the first reviewer, plugging in this drive results in a virtual CD (VCD) containing the SmartWare installation routine and product manuals being mapped to one of your computer drive letters. I tried several different tactics to dismount this VCD to free up my limited drive letters but I could not do so. This is just plain arrogance on the part of Western Digital to assume that they could grab a drive letter with the install software location and not allow the user to dismount the VCD.

For the most basic computer user perhaps this is a non-issue but anyone with a home network, attached media card readers, and USB flash drives will quickly discover that drive letters cannot be kidnapped by a VCD that is not even usable beyond the initial install of the WD SmartWare software.

2) Unlike the previous generation model, this external hard drive's driver must be installed (at least to a Windows Vista or Windows 7 OS) from the VCD. It is not simply plug-and-play for the OS does not have the proper driver to access the device. WD does provide instructions on their website on how to install just the drive's driver from the VCD without having to install the entire SmartWare utility, but the source of the install is that dreaded VCD mentioned in my point (1) above. This means that as of this review date there is no way to install the most current driver WD release, leading to my third CON point:

3) The current driver for this device causes blue screen of death (BSOD) error 0x0000008E in Windows 7 (a moderately rigorous troubleshooting effort by me costing a few hours of my time isolated this driver as the root cause). I am running Windows 7 release candidate/build 7100, which is supposed to be close to the RTM version about to come out on 10/22/09. I was forced to uninstall the driver due to the instability this driver introduced to my Win7 OS environment. With Win7 so close to release, I would have expected a stable version of the device driver to be available to the public but that does not seem to be the case.

(note, I would accept that perhaps this RC version of Win7 might also contain some code that is interfering with the WD driver and that the RTM version coming out in a couple of weeks will resolve this problem, but my first two CONS still make this drive a no-deal for me.)


Pros
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1) For the most basic computer user WD SmartWare will simplify your backup needs and give you a way to quickly establish proper data backups.

Beware of WD's SmartWare software!!
BUYER BEWARE....This is a great hard drive, except for one fatal issue. Western Digital includes their backup software, "SmartWare" on this drive. That's normally not an issue, you reformat and partition the drive and it's gone. However, WD included a special virtual CD (VCD) partition as part of the enclosure or firmware, which is NOT accessible to the user. I've tried all the utilities in OS X, Windows, and Ubuntu Linux to destroy this VCD, but no luck. I contacted Western Digital inquiring about a removal utility or firmware flash, and they gave me a run around answer and basically said no, we have no plans to do that.

The VCD automatically mounts on your machine when the drive is inserted, which gets annoying very quickly. I found a workaround in OS X and Windows, to keep the VCD partition from mounting, but it shouldn't have to be this way.

If you've ever had to deal with the horrid U3 software on a SanDisk flash drive, then you'll know what I'm talking about. At least SanDisk provides a utility to remove their software, and gain back the full capacity of the drive. This SmartWare VCD uses almost 1GB of the drive. A drop in the bucket, yes, but I don't like being told how to use my storage space by Western Digital.

Aside from that, it functions and is built quite well. My only other complaint is that the barrel plug for the power adapter, and the USB cable sit pretty loosely in the back of the drive when they're connected and are prone to falling out if you move the drive around too much.

Otherwise, a good hard drive.