Pros: Noise, design, capacity, value, ease of installation and use
Cons: Somewhat sparse documentation
The Bottom Line: The ease of use and installation, capacity, performance, product design, and look and feel make this a very nice addition to a PC. Included trial software looks good too.
f8ster's Full Review: Western Digital My Bookâ„¢ Essential Edition 2.0 (...
Quick Summary
Good size, quiet, unobtrusive, works as expected. Good value, tons of space.
What’s in the Box
MyBook, AC adapter, USB cable.
Aesthetics
The outer shell is a very nice glossy black. The bottom has small rubber feet that cushion shock when placing the drive, and also provide some clearance for airflow through the unit when placed on a hard surface. It’s quiet and runs cool/barely warm to the touch. It’s a nice size – a bit wide, but that extra width does make it more stable and less likely to tip over. There are only two connectors on the back of the device: power and USB. There’s a blue LED strip on the front that is on solid when the drive’s powered and flashes when there’s drive activity.
Power
There is no power switch. The drive will power off when you power off your PC, or when you use the ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ feature in Windows.
The AC power adapter is really wide, and might cover up several slots in a power strip, depending on what kind you use (it didn’t on mine, but I have a power strip with several wide plugs especially for AC adapters).
Actual Capacity
The usable capacity of the 1TB MyBook is 931 GB.
Installation (Windows)
The MyBook supports both Mac and Windows. I’ll discuss the experience on Windows XP Service Pack 2.
Installation on a Windows XP machine is as simple as plugging the drive into AC power and an available USB 2.0 post on your PC. Windows will discover the drive and map it to a drive letter. The drive comes loaded with several applications (described below) that you can install directly from the MyBook.
Unlike some other MyBook models, this model does not have a Firewire (IEEE 1394) port. You must connect it via USB.
Backing Up the Apps
The first thing you’ll want to do is copy the included applications. You can do so by using the included software on the MyBook. Simply run setup.exe from the root of the MyBook; one of the available options is to ‘Copy Application Software.’ When you run this, the applications will be copied to C:\Program Files\Western Digital, although neither the application nor the documentation will tell you this. It silently backs them up and exits. I had to poke around on my C: drive to find where it put them.
Reformatting as NTFS
Once the apps are backed up, the next thing you’ll probably want to do is reformat the drive as NTFS. The drive comes formatted as FAT32 from the factory. FAT32 has some fairly significant limitations (such as 4 GB file size limits, which can be a problem if you’re using the MyBook to store home video, for example). This is an easy process through Windows’ Disk Management utility. (Right-click on My Computer, Manage, Storage, Disk Management; from there, you can right-click the MyBook and select Format. This destroys all data on the disk, so be careful to pick the correct drive! Be sure to back up the included applications first, as described above.)
Included Applications
The MyBook comes with two main applications: Memeo AutoBackup and Memeo AutoSync. Both are 30-day, fully-functional trial versions.
AutoBackup provides a set-and-forget way to back up your C: drive data files to the MyBook on a regular and automated basis. I found its default settings somewhat limited (for example, it had excluded my E: drive from the backup, which is where all my data is). I already use a full-featured backup package (Acronis True Image), so after playing around with AutoBackup for a bit, I uninstalled it. However, it looks like a pretty good basic backup application.
AutoSync provides the ability to set up pairs of folders – one on your C: drive, for example, and the other on the MyBook – and have them automatically kept synchronized. For example, you can set up your ‘My Documents’ folder to be synced to your MyBook, so that when you travel, you can have the whole contents available (and they can also be kept encrypted). Two-way sync is automatic. I haven’t used this app extensively, but depending on how you use the MyBook, this could be a very useful package.
The MyBook also comes with some Google applications you can install (Google Toolbar, Desktop, and Picasa) as well as Acrobat Reader.
Documentation
The documentation included with the drive is sparse. There’s a quick-start guide in the box, and a PDF user guide on the MyBook itself. The user guide is very short (9 pages) and has little detail. I did not find much help in the documentation for the few questions I did have. However, the MyBook itself is simple enough that you don’t really need a whole lot of documentation for basic operation, so this is a minor complaint.
Performance
The drive performance was in line with my expectations. I sustained 35 MB/s (megabytes per second) write to the MyBook, and 34 MB/s read from the MyBook using standard Windows copy of a single large file. This equates to about 2 GB/min. System backups to the MyBook using an example backup app such as Acronis True Image (not included with the MyBook) were averaging about 1.34 GB/min (no compression) and 1.75 GB/min (normal compression). See my review of Acronis True Image here: http://www.epinions.com/content_220616887940 .
Portability
The User Guide says “don’t use as a portable drive,” which I thought was interesting, as this is one of the main benefits of an external drive, in my opinion. In my case, I’m using this for offsite backup of my data, so I will be taking it with me. To help protect it, I have ordered a case for it (Western Digital has cases just for the MyBook that are very reasonably priced, around $20).
Summary
Overall, there’s very little to complain about here, so I’m giving this product a high rating. The setup is extremely easy, and the included backup and sync software (although trialware) looks well-fit to the product and useful. Performance, product design, and capacity are all very good, and although the prices of these external drives continue to drop dramatically, I feel this was a very good purchase for the money. If you’ve ever lost data, you’ll know how valuable having a full offsite backup of your entire PC’s contents can be.
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