WD My Book Essential 500GB USB 2.0 3.5″ Desktop External Hard Drive WDBAAF5000EBK-NESN

Pros: Cheap, nice looking, that’s about it

Cons: These have no longevity whatsoever. They will fail under minimal usage in about a years time. The warranty on them used to be 6 months because WD knew they wouldn’t last long after that, now it’s 2 years, but what good is that when your back-up solution fails. With this, you need a back-up of your back-up to be safe, so go with another manufacturer. I had lost too much data and spent too much time recovering from using these drives, don’t make the same mistake.

Overall Review: You get what you pay for, like I said in the pro’s it’s cheap, but the reason is the cons.

Pros: Great drive, have had these for years. Great Price/GB ratio and fast drive.

Cons: Quality of the enclosures of the My Book series has seriously gone down hill. I wish they would go back to the old design. I have 4 My Books and they all work very well. That is why it gets 4 Stars.

Overall Review: If you need simple storage then this is it. If you are looking for a powerhouse drive then look at some of the other offerings.

Pros: Lots of space, cheap, WD quality drive.

Read/Write speed was acceptable for a backup drive.

Cons: My two biggest concerns are the fragility of the drive and the un-ease of access.

It took a small fall on a soft surface and stopped working.

Every time you plugged it into a computer, it couldn’t find the driver for the controller, which wasn’t needed to use it anyway.

As many of the externals, you have to wipe out any stupid service partitions on it before using it.

Overall Review: 2 Stars because it technically worked until it was hurt a little.

This drive was used as a backup medium for my customers. I would backup their hard drive to it and use this as my tech drive. One day, it was knocked off a table onto a rug. There was not much trauma as a hard drive should be able to withstand some abuse. The hard drive controller never responded correctly after that. I tried replacing the drive, the cables, checking to see if anything came loose, but alas, I think WD cheaped out on the controller.

I’m never going segate but this makes me want to go elsewhere. I’m going for essentials from now on, no matter how sexy a mybook could seem.

Pros: Quiet, looks good, fairly fast transfers, backup software for those who want it.

Cons: N/A

Pros: Nice sleek look and small

Cons: This unit installs w/ 2 drives, one for storage and one virtual drive that contains the backup software… WHY?
Some computers I tried to install on, it delayed the bootup process up to 10 minutes. I decided to stay with the Seagate Freeagent… they just work!

Pros: Its got a lot of space.
It was very good while it lasted.

Cons: It died after about a year. Great, bye bye backup drive. I never used their software, you don’t really need to. Poor case cooling would be my guess as to what happened from what I read… I should have drilled a hole into my minifridge and ran it in there I guess.

Overall Review: Note to self. 500gb internal drive is cheaper anyway… get one of those, stick with the 10gb stick.

Pros: It’s quite, it will work great

Cons: It will crash after time, roughly the time you get comfortable with it.

Overall Review: I would recommend it to everyone if I hadn’t gone through so many of them after repeated crashes. I’ve had 10 of them over my computer years and 100% of them crash they are not meant for the long haul what so ever. I wouldn’t wish the amount of stress that I have endured today after my 10th crash on anyone. Look to a different brand I’ve tried every variation here and none of them can last more than 8 months.

Pros: Drive worked fine for the first year.

Cons: 70% failure rate within months of warranty expiration.

Overall Review: I am a consultant and used to recommend these to clients for external backups. Bad mistake – 70% or more of the drives from this series have failed within a few months of warranty expiration. I wrote a letter to Western Digital outlining my experiences with these drives and got back a reply simply saying they disagreed with the reported failure rate and didn’t think there was anything wrong with their products. Western Digital is doing a terrible job of making reliable drives.