Western Digital Elements 500GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive

In all this isn't a bad little drive. I noticed a previous reviewer mentioned that this drive got a little hot, but it's nothing compared to the plastic cased drives. This one comes in a nice solid aluminium case with nice rubber wrapped ends for protection and "non slippiness" and the case does a good job of dissipating the heat.

Compared to the My Book drives also by WD, this drive is a dream. It's not the fastest drive in the world I will admit, but it's one of the more reliable ones.

I bought this to store my photos on after they've been processed on my laptop, well that was the intention, but it's currently in use on my main pc at the moment as a back up drive as the main pc has crashed, so it's holding all my data from that whilst I reinstall Windows XP and there's still loads of room to spare, (it swallowed all 320Gb of data from it!)

Yes, when you get it you'll need a good 2-3 hrs to reformat it into NTFS if you're using XP or Vista, YES it will get a tad warm when in use (NOT HOT!) & YES it's very quiet in fact virtually silent, YES it's quick if you plug it into a USB2 socket.

The only thing that I'm not comfortable about is the only way to shut it down is to either pull the USB cable out or pull the plug on it (there's NO on/off switch or button), just be sure that you let it finish its work 1st though and it seems no worse for doing so.

And Amazon is currently the cheapest place to get this device.

Bought this from Ebuyer a while ago and I'm really happy with it. I had bought other WD external drives before but only the "MyBook" drives and although these are nice looking and stack well, they don't keep the drive very cool with the plastic housing. This drive has a nice rugged aluminium housing which conducts the heat pretty well, causing it to dissipate. Which is a good thing. It has a rubber cap on each end of the drive to reduce slip and give it a bit more protection.

The transfer rates are pretty good for USB 2.0 and accessing it with lots of smallish files (15mb-30mb) contained on it doesn't take too long although it isn't fast but this is pretty normal. The cables are pretty good quality and fit snugly. As was said in another review there is no on/off switch but unplugging the USB lead turns it off and it doesn't have any ill effects.

All in all this is a very good drive and a lot cheaper than buying an internal drive and housing. It does come formatted in FAT32 but this is for compatibility issues and is normal for most external drives, especially the Western Digital drives. Formatting the drive to NTFS doesn't have to take hours as long as you check the "Quick Format" check box when formatting, this does the same as a full format for new "clean" HDD and only takes a couple of seconds using XP or higher.

***UPDATE:***

Bought another one of these for a backup of all my MP3 files and other things (just in case), got it for the nice price of £74 (it's gone up now) and thought I had a bargain. I do but a nice surprise is that this seems to be an updated version of the drive and has a power switch now. That makes me happy and a little more reassured that I can keep it all plugged in but switch it off when not in use.

Hope that's useful to someone, unfortunately I can't see anything on the box that indicates it is an updated model, nothing different from my other drives box, I'm just assuming that the newer batches are coming with a power switch now.