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Western Digital My Book Essential 500GB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive | 
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| Brand: Western Digital
Category: CE
Buy New: £53.00
New (27) from £53.00
Rating:  76 reviews
Sales Rank: 12
Media: Electronics
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Fragile: No
Batteries Included: No
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.5
Dimensions (in): 5.4 x 2.1 x 6.5
MPN: WDH1U5000E
Model: WDH1U5000E
UPC: 718037120928
EAN: 0718037120928
ASIN: B000WP0NM8
Release Date: November 25, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 2-3 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 71 more reviews...
 frail and plasticy August 30, 2008
J. Cashman (UK)
I already have a metal case WD 500GB drive which seems robust and has been working well for many months. Thought this one would be a bit lighter to take on the plane - it is just a rather frail plastic case. The loaded software is not very good looking at independant reviews and in any case are only 30d trials. It is working OK at the moment and is good value for money. I wish I had gone for the 320GB passport model which is much more compact and looks equally robust or simply bought another (smaller) and tougher metal cased version.
Given other peoples concern about reliability, I think I might avoid this particular model if buying again.
 Fantastic external HDD August 28, 2008
J. Baker (Devon, UK)
I was quite astounded by this product, so much storage and so cheap. It even looks good! It worked first time on both my Macbook and my PC.
Don't even try the included software; this disk is plug and play with any modern computer.
Highly recommended. You can be confident buying this.
At the risk of being a boring old fart, I will tell you that 30 years ago I bought a hard disk - 8MB, yes MB not GB. It was the size of a washing machine and cost 10,000 UK pounds. Things have moved on a bit...
 Major, major risk August 19, 2008
catboylikesay (London, UK)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
WD keep updating the outside of the box, but don't seem to have done anything about the fundamental problem which a lot of reviewers (including myself) have experienced: namely, after about 18 months you will get an I/O error, followed by clicks, followed by the disk being totally inaccessible. WD will provide a replacement, but all your data will be lost. This was a great storage solution until the day it died. As a permanent solution, experience has shown it to be unreliable.
Rock Solid August 16, 2008
Bob Singleton (West Molesey, Surrey)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I just keep buying these!
Rock solid performance, easy set up. I now have 4 or 5 of these to store photos, videos and for backups of my laptop's hard drive.
No doubt I'll be buying a few more as and when my storage requirements dictate.
BEWARE the Click of Death! August 13, 2008
Matteus
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
Had this 6 months and it died suddenly - whenever I tried to connect it or power it up I got 3 slow clicking noises followed by 3 more then nothing....drive no longer found.
Whilst I had some DVD backups burned I was keen to try and get my most recent data off it. The recovery & replacement are expensive. WD support is automated and useless.
Luckily I found a method of getting the drive out of the case on Ransackery.com and while doing so noted that a large number of other owners have experienced the same problem. Turns out the power and USB connectors are less than robust according to posts on FixYa.
As a reasonably fearless person when it comes to opening up hardware I was able to recover everything and in fact I still use the internal disk drive itself as it's fine once connected to my PC which permanently has its case open anyway.
God forbid anyone non-technical should use this for backing up critical business data. I will steer well clear of WD products in future.
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