The world’s best-selling external hard drive now features a new, smart, visual backup solution that protects your data automatically. Smaller, sleeker, more streamlined design - WD has made these award-winning drives even smaller, sleeker, and more elegant. As always, this book-like shape takes up less space on your desk and allows two or more My Book drives to nestle neatly together like volumes on a shelf. WD SmartWare - A control center for your drive that gives you the power to: Protect your data automatically - Relax. Your data is secure. Automatic, continuous backup will instantly make a second copy whenever you add or change a file. See your backup as it happens - Seeing is believing. Visual backup displays your content categories and shows the progress of your backup. Bring back lost files effortlessly - Retrieve your valuable data to its original location whether you’ve lost all your data or just overwritten an important file. Take control - Customize your backup, set drive security, run diagnostics, manage the power settings, and more from the WD SmartWare control center. Drive lock - Gain peace of mind knowing that your data is protected from unauthorized access or theft with password protection and military-grade 256-bit hardware-based encryption. Illuminated capacity gauge - See at a glance how much space is available on your drive. USB 2.0 interface - A simple connection that offers convenience and compatibility among multiple computers. Power miser - My Book external drives are designed to save energy. WD GreenPower Technology lowers internal drive power consumption by up to 30%, a sleep mode reduces power during idle times, and a power-saving feature turns the drive on and off with your computer. Planet friendly - We designed a small box to minimize waste and used recycled material. We encourage you to recycle it. Ready to plug-and-play with Windows PCs - if you’re a Mac user, check out our Mac version of this product.
Average Customer Review: ( 22 customer reviews )
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33 of 36 found the following review helpful:
This drive has serious issues Oct 11, 2009
By Wildness This drive is embedded with Western Digital's SmartWare virtual CD that will ALWAYS and FOREVER boot to your Mac computer. This Virtual CD cannot be disabled, unmounted, removed, eradicated, or partitioned away - EVERY!!!!! It says so right on WD's website buried in the tech support area, not on the box where this kind of "don't-buy-our-product" warning belongs. Western Digital has decided to embed their Virtual CD Smartware into this drive so that you cannot, under any circumstances, disable or remove the VCD. It will forever mount this unwanted intrusion to your Mac (Windows is no better apparently) and their website essentially tells you that you can do nothing about it.
Can you tell that I am upset?!? I own seven other Western Digital hard drives and I will not own this one. Nor will I buy another in the future out of fear of getting the same results.
Like many people, I have no need for their backup or security software as I just want external drivers for pure storage. If I were to buy more of these like I had planned, My desktop would be cluttered with a bunch of meaningless virtual CDs. This intrusion may not annoy Windows users as the Virtual CDs will just clutter up your "My Computer" window; but, on a Mac this type of unalterable intrusion is beyond unacceptable. I cannot believe that Western Digital could not see the alienation of every Mac user on the planet from ten miles away on this one.
Western Digital and other drive makers have, for a while now, put their software install packages onto the external hard drives that they sell; but, it has always been just stored on the drive where it can be deleted or is removed when the drive is reformatted - at worst it was on a separate partition that could be removed. But, not with this new version (version 3?) of the My Book Essential Drives where it is embedded into the drive's hardware and cannot be deactivated. Until Western Digital rethinks their strategy and changes this practice, their hard drives should be avoided and boycotted.
(For more information, see all of the review on the 1TB version of this drive.)
UPDATE: After returning the Essentials drive, I purchased two of Western Digital's Elements External 1TB Hard Drives; Exactly what I needed in the first place... an external hard drive that is built like a tank and is only what it is supposed to be: a hard drive. No "fancy" value-added software embedded in the hardware to muck up the works on this drive. I highly recommend the Western Digital Elements external hard drives for all of your storage needs!
14 of 16 found the following review helpful:
Unreliable Hard Drive - Goodbye Western Digital Nov 11, 2009
By Taufiq Habib Western Digital continues to disappoint. My Mybook drive just failed - (makes clicking sounds). Good thing I know not to rely on such a flaky brand name for important backups.
I have not used this drive much - I have drives from other manufacturers which have lasted 5 times longer and are still going.
I have had problems with WD since the last 17 years. Once I got a batch of 5 drives all of which failed within 3 months.
Now I only get a WD in my hands if its a left over from some project where I did not order it. But now I think even no drive is better than a free unreliable hard drive.
I was also disappointed to read another review here where one has to run some proprietary WD software in order to use the drive.
DONT WASTE YOUR MONEY AND TIME.
Buy from another manufacturer.
10 of 11 found the following review helpful:
Why oh why. Oct 27, 2009
By YouReview I've used WD products in the past, but now I see that they super-glued on this stupid virtual CD object in the external drive. What could they possibly have been thinking.
WD is permanently off of my purchase list.
6 of 6 found the following review helpful:
You can remove the virtual CD Apr 20, 2010
By Okay, listen ... I bought this drive and was immediately annoyed with the fact that I could not just plug it in and get going. It made me install some utility software that "automatically and unobtrusively" backs up your files. There were a bunch of things running in the background, and the backup utility was displaying this message "categorizing your files". WTH? Anyway, I was about to just take it back for a refund.
But I did some searching and found that the virtual CD baloney can be removed:
[...]
I followed the instructions and now I have a simple, clean backup drive like I wanted originally, and just takes up a single drive letter instead of two.
The 3-star review means average, that the drive will probably do what I bought it for. I will revise later if necessary.
But seriously, I hate it when these vendors assume that they know what you need better than you do. I could tolerate being given the option to use it, but to be forced to install that junk as a prerequisite to even getting access to the drive is pretty stupefying. I honestly do not see how that virtual CD thing is going to improve anyone's life. And to have to search the web for a work-around just compounds the dumbness.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
waste of money,no tech support!!!!!!!! Jan 10, 2011
By Vadar I purchased this piece of junk about 3 months ago. Ive never dropped it and ive taken care of it. But 3 days ago i plugged my wd my book to my computer and my computer wont recognize it. My disk management does not recognize it. So i call wd tech support and they said i had to pay $15.00 for them to help me with this annoying and troubling issue only so they could tell me 60 seconds after i paid them that they couldnt help me and that they were sorry. Not to mention you cant understand what in the world they are saying. Their english is horrible. I have so much photos and important information on my drive,I am extremely unsatisfied and wish i could sue them for falsely advertising this pathetic money and time costly product!!!!!!!!!!!!
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based on 22 reviews
This drive has serious issues Oct 11, 2009
By Wildness
You can remove the virtual CD Apr 20, 2010
By Okay, listen ...
