Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 640 GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive WDH1U6400N

From Western Digital

Price:	~~$119.99~~

Accessories
- Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition FULL VERSION with SP2
- Microsoft Outlook 2007
- AmazonBasics IEEE 1394 4-Pin/6-Pin FireWire Cable (6 Feet / 1.8 Meters) [Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging]
- AmazonBasics USB 2.0 A-Male to Mini-B Cable (6 Feet / 1.8 Meters) [Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging]
- AmazonBasics USB 2.0 A-Male to B-Male Cable (6 Feet / 1.8 Meters) [Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging]

Features
- Includes - External hard drive, USB cable, AC adapter and Quick Install Guide
- Smart and energy efficient - Turns itself on and off with your computer
- Save and organize your digital photo collection
- USB 2.0 Serial Bus Transfer Rate - 480 Mbits/s
- System Requirements - Available USB port, Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later

Product Description
Are you running out of hard drive capacity? Do you need to archive some important digital documents, photos, or music? This elegant external hard drive, reminiscent of a book, is the perfect solution. It takes no more space than a paperback book. Collect two or more and they nest neatly together like volumes on a shelf.Small, simple, elegant, and very easy to use. Just plug it in, and you've got plenty of room to back up and save your valuable data, music, photos, and movies.

Customer Reviews

A data center on a shelf
Date: 2008-02-04 | Rating: 5
It is very hard to argue with the amount of storage that one of these drives offer. If you have been in the industry for awhile, you can remember when a terabyte of data meant an entire data center of storage! These drives are quite and they format to NTFS quickly as long as you remember to specify quick format!! I have been pleased enough with the drive that I now own 6 of them. My laptop now has 6 terabyte of storage to work with! Since I do a lot of music and video work, that is important to me. Considering the fact that these drives now run about $229 when on sale, why would you not buy one? Keep in mind that if you connect multiple drives, you will want to use different controlled ports on your computer; not just a USB hub (the reason is each dedicated port of a USB 2.0 can only work at a total of 400 MB/S. That means if you have multiple drives on the same controlled port that they are sharing that speed (this will really show up if you are moving data from one drive to another on the same hub). Remember, having 4 ports on your computer does not mean that they are 4 seperately controlled ports! Check your users manual or call technical support for your product to see how many seperately controlled ports you really have. I have now moved all of my video, photos, and music to these drives (3 terabyte) and use the other three terabyte as mirrored drives (fail safe)and it is all easily accessable on my computer and on my network through my computer. I have had the first drive for 5 months now and have added the others as they went on sale. I have not had any boot issues (mentioned in other reviews) and all of the lights go off when the computer is powered down. I am running Vista Ultimate with all updates and I am using an IBM ThinkPad with current BIOS. Great drives!!!

Sleek and quiet
Date: 2007-10-30 | Rating: 5
My expectations were beyond met when I plugged this in. It amazes me that a 1tb external HD can be so quiet. I had returned a 1tb older version of Western digital's external HD because it sounded like a jet engine. WD clearly fixed that problem. The design is sleek and stylish, it is perfectly silent, and it transfers quickly with a 2.0 USB port. I highly recommend this product. UPDATE: I've had the product for 7 months now and I still stand by my original review. It has never given me any problems or crashed.

Plug and Play External Drive
Date: 2008-08-13 | Rating: 5
I currently have 2 terabytes of storage, 6 do-it-yourself "DIY" external drives housing various sized hard drives, and a MyBook. This review compares their performance. All drives are currently on-line connected to a 7 port USB hub. In the Box A black box housing the drive, a brick power supply, and a USB cable are key items. 2 instruction sheets, and a warranty card complete the kit. The My Book is about the size of a bible one finds in hotel and motel rooms. The drive case, power and cables leave a very clean design. All my DIY drives comes with stands, awkward sized power supplies and cable placements that are not well thought through. Installation Simple: Plug the USB cable into the MyBook, and into your PC USB port. Plug in the power supply to AC and the MyBook. The MyBook has no power switch, and turns itself on/off if the USB port is powered, when the PC is on. The drive was recognized by WinXPSP2 without a hitch, and re-formatting the drive to NTFS was easy using WinXP built in disk utilities. The drive ships with FAT32 format, which is less desirable if NTFS can be supported. I backuped the shipped "trial" utilities inside the MyBook in case they were useful; they were not, and it was not clear were it was stored: C:\Program Files\Western Digital. I used Western Digital's disk utilities that shipped with my other drives to check partitions and drive status. These programs can also be downloaded free from Western Digital's web site. Break-in The drive ran over 1 week for 24/7 for a burn in, and has done a 24 hour long disk encryption format routine. it is currently a month old running 16 hours/day. Its surprisingly silent, and runs cooler than my DIY drives. USB 2.0 Speed It has a transfer rate of 10MB/sec. This is not the raw transfer rate, but includes delay from encryption I use. This is about 6x slower than the maximum USB transfer speed of 60 MB/sec but is the same rate as my other DIY drives. Conclusion: Excellent bang for buck. The cost to build a DIY external drive today may often be more than buying a pre-made external drive. USB 2.0 transfer speeds suggests the MyBook drive is a decent speed drive. The auto on/off feature is very helpful, given most DIY kits require manual power-down. Note, there are a number of complaints about the higher end MyBook drives. The simple electronics of the low end 'Essential Edition' maybe the saving grace to this drive's performance, keep this in mind as the display boxes look the same. Further, all drives can malfunction, so a burn-in is a must to insure your drive is not among the few bad eggs.

Fantastic working and fantastic looking!
Date: 2008-01-07 | Rating: 5
I have had this hard drive for about a month now and have had no real problems with it. It is very quiet and has not had any hiccups. The only thing I have noticed may be a problem with Windows Vista. When the computer goes to sleep (hibernate and off works fine) the hard drive becomes unrecognizable when booting back up. However, all you have to do is unplug the USB port and then plug it back in and it works like a charm. Also, the drive will park itself after a while and when accessing it again it takes a few seconds for it to start running again. Other than that it works like it is supposed to. Running movies off of it works without stuttering. It also looks great. I would definitely recommend this product!

Quiet, lots of storage, good price
Date: 2007-12-26 | Rating: 5
The drive runs very quiet. It powers itself off at times of inactivity. The transfer speed is decent, can't ask for much more from a backup drive. The price is reasonable. It also comes with simple backup software right on the HD. The only minor issues I have are 1) the included mini-usb cable is about 3 feet long, and 2) when your PC is not shut off, the drive still has its light on even though it's sleeping. This light is very bright in a small room at night. Other than that, it's very easy to use: just plug-n-play.

Western Digital My Book

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 640 GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive WDH1U6400N

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