INTRODUCTION Western Digital is the second largest hard drive manufacturer in the world after Seagate, and they have been around since 1970. However, while Seagate are a bigger company, Western Digital has always been my favourite hard drive manufacturer as their drives have always ourperformed Seagate in my experience. In this review, I put the Western Digital MyBook Essential Edition 500gb, from about 2006/2007, to the test. SPECIFICATIONS The 3.5" hard drive inside the enclosure has a speed of 7200 RPM, which is a fairly normal but good speed for consumer hard drives. It has 16mb buffer, which again is a good value for consumer hard drives. ...  Read the complete review

We bought the My Book Essential external hard drive 6 months ago to back up our home computer. The hard drive is 500GB which can hold up to 60 hours of HD videos or 125,000 MP3 files or 100,000 JPEG files. I am not very good with IT however we found this easy to install. The My Book Essential comes with an external power supply and a USB cable. Plug in the power supply and connect to the computer using the USB cable. If you are a windows user a Found New Hardware window appears, simply install the driver to activate the drive settings. The user manual is available on-line to download. It is easy to set it up to automatically back up the ...  Read the complete review

I first got my Western Digital My Book for a specific reason. It was christmas day, I just opened up an 80GB iPod and i was thnking great, I can put all my MP3's onto it and enjoy. Being the IT person I am i needed to make sure I had a system in place for a neat setup, because storing 80GB of music in an iTunes folder in My Documents was not practical, would make backing up My Documents a nightmare, meaning it wouldn't happen, meanig I could loose data if my hard drive died. Further to that I knew that adding all my CD's etc would mean very quickly to get over 80GB of music, and my C Drive on my main laptop could not cope with that, as it was only ...  Read the complete review

I've purchased a few versions of these hard drives. They tend to be very competitively priced, and Western Digital have a reputation for producing quality products. If one was to compare them to their namesake, a book, one would have to think along the lines of a large hard back bible, in a format just slightly larger than A5, not a pocket sized novella, or a mini-travel guide. They also have a significant weight, possibly comparable to a small netbook. As they are powered by an adaptor, this also reduces their portability, and will add to the burden of weight that you have to carry around with you. These drives cannot be powered by USB. They are ...  Read the complete review

This is a 500GB hard drive from Western Digital, capable of storing anything you can store on your computer. That include photos, videos, music, documents, programs, games - you name it, this thing can hold it. It comes with a power cable and USB lead to connect it to your laptop or PC. One important factor to bear in mind is that you will definitely not get access to the full 500GB when you purchase this hard drive. In any other industry, you have a right to expect whatever quantity that is advertised in a sale will be what you receive - if a bottle of milk says two litres on it, it contains two litres. Unfortunately, for whatever reason the computer world is ...  Read the complete review