Western Digital My Book Home 500 GB USB 2.0/FireWire 400/eSATA Desktop External Hard Drive WDH1CS5000N

From Western Digital
	Price: $154.99
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Features - Sold Individually Product Description Preserve your precious memories with this ideal combination of elegant, reliable storage and automatic backup features. Your baby's first step, your wedding in Bali, all your important milestones...all captured in digital photos and video. What could be more important? Store them safely and keep them backed up on My Book Home Edition external hard drives. Customer Reviews Excellent and flexible external hard drive Date: 2008-03-25 | Rating: 5 I have this drive and also the 1 TB version, connected to two different PCs each running Windows XP Pro SP2. Both drives are excellent although I will mention one caveat below about the other 1 TB unit. I have not experienced any problems with this 500 GB drive. The drives both installed easily and automatically. They come formatted for FAT32 which makes them compatible with earlier versions of Windows although it limits file sizes. Windows Disk Management easily reformats them to NTFS. Although the reformat takes several hours. You can continue using the PC itself, though, while the reformat proceeds. Something unusual about the USB2 and eSATA interfaces. I tried the USB2 interface on both drives. I also tried the eSATA interface - in one case connecting to an eSATA port through a PCI card (and the PC has a 33 MHz PCI bus, not a 66 MHz PCI bus) and in the other case to a PCIx PCI Express interface. In both cases (!), the USB2 interface provided faster throughput than the eSATA interface. I believe the limitation is inside the PC, and NOT inside the drive. Nevertheless, it transfers about 1.6 GB in about 2.5 to 3.0 minutes. Plenty fast for my use. I now use the USB2 interface. Note that the fancy although difficult to interpret white LED display in the front of the drive works with USB and FireWire although not with eSATA. This 500 GB drive is super quiet all the time. The 1 TB unit is a bit odd. After accessing it, some time later it will sometimes make a low-level rapid clicking/whirring noise until the drive is again accessed at which time the noise stops. I actually replaced the 1 TB drive through WD and both drives did this. The drive passes the extended diagnostic test and WD says I am probably hearing a normal noise. I took it off the desktop and put it on top of the mini-tower so the noise no longer bothers me. I use Acronis software to do disk image backups with these drives and also do simple backups of user folders through Windows. The drives makes this so easy. I wholeheartedly recommend this 500 GB drive and also recommend the 1 TB unit although be aware of the possible noise. Very Quick and Easy Setup Date: 2007-11-20 | Rating: 5 I selected this unit because I use an iMac for my home business and I generate a lot of photos....over 50,000 high-res images in the past two years. I settled on the Western Digital My Book HD because of its Firewire 400 hookup and its 500 GB of storage. The fact that the manufacturer markets to Mac users was also a plus. It took me all of 5 minutes to unpack the device, hook it up using the supplied Firewire cable, plug it in, and start using it. I set up the hard drive to transfer 1,368 photos (a wedding I shot two weekends ago), then walked away. In 30 (or so) minutes all images were copied to the device...flawlessly and efficiently. I have two other external HDs that I also copy photos to, but the Western Digital My Book HD was vastly superior to them in terms of ease of setup and startup. Great item, ports not large enough Date: 2008-03-25 | Rating: 5 I have used the WD 500 GB My Book Home Edition for about a month now. Everything worked great. The only slight issue is that the cut-outs in the plastic on the back for the cables are too small. The mini-USB and power cable worked fine, but I had to cut extra room the eSATA cable to plug in. Great product, good price. Smaller than it appears but The size I need it Date: 2008-02-22 | Rating: 5 I was unsure which one to get, but I found this and it is good, I can use it USB or Firewire, the sSata is not really usefull for me now, the plus thing I found on it is that it turns on and off automatically with the computer, so no need to go and click on the power botton. works great Date: 2008-07-07 | Rating: 5 this product works great! we bought this as a secondary back-up to another 500 GB drive. with 2 backup drives and 3 year warranties i am not worried about losing any digital pics!