Long lastin contender (Western Digital My Book Essential Edition WDG1U5000 500 GB)

Member Name: tlmartin

Product:	Western Digital My Book Essential Edition WDG1U5000 500 GB
Date:	17/05/09 (4 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: High capacity, power on and off with PC, style

Disadvantages: No USB passthrough or ability to power multiple from 1 powercable

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 60GB and i didn't want to waste space on music which could be used for applications and processing. What i needed as an external hard drive I could put my music on and podcasts, etc purely for my iPod, so boxing day sales, PC World has this on offer, Western Digital had been becoming my prefered Hard Drive vendor taking over from Maxtor (whos Hard drive range seemed stagnant).

I got the hard drive and used it, it was simple to plug in and use, to format to NTFS for the best file storage facility. iTunes worked great using it as a storage drive, and it kept the correct location with windows throughout being plugged in and unplugged (i've had drives randomly change drive letters i've assigned them (and nothign else had their letter).

The hard drive was quick, putting music on was quick, syncing to iPod was a dream fantastic. I was there putting music on still 3 days later and one of my cats ran over the table and dragged it from the table to the floor, "noooooooo" i thought hard drive crash to floor, night mare. It still worked perfecly, not even a hiccup.

This hard drive I have used constnatly for ages now, been fantastic, as I moved over to gettgin some NAS drives my music has gone there with a networked iTunes system for the whole house, so this drive is now used for vast storage, i.e. raw movie files a store after importing into movie editting software, for soundclips archive as i sort through them to put on DVD for students to use in coursework projects.

Emergency store when I need t get data off a drive to format it. This drive works quickly, efficiently, quietly, and without error.

The drive is energy saving as it powers off with the PC and back on with the PC.

There is also the typical western digital software to be able to do backups and syncs with it, but I havne't used that as I don't need it.

The final thing is the looks. We are talking about fantastic style, calling it a myBook, what an idea. This thing isn;t one of these huge square hard drives that look ugly, waste space between each other because of the base feet, or have to be laid on the desk. No this one looks like a book, and is designed that you could stack a huge number of these nextto each other on a shelf (normal book height) and they don stand out or take a load of space, obviously then you conenct each cable to a USB HUB which is conencted to the PC.

Overall a great drive to hve. I have just used the 1TB versions for a client who has 5 for a rolling backup with Small Business Server 2008 (those I will review soon)

Western Digital, fantastic.

Summary: If you need an extra 500GB of storage get this drive

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