Western Digital 1TB USB 2.0 MyBook Studio External Hard Drive with FireWire 800

It worked fine straight out of the box; straight plug and play. The Firewire800 offers good performance. It is easy to find a place for it on a desktop, without creating mess and clutter.
The WD Smartware is an irritation as I don't want it. As it comes mounted in a disk partition, it is a nuisance to dispose of it. With a number of these devices, you get the same thing every time. There could be a better and less intrusive way to offer it.
The other irritation is lack of control over the disk spinning down when not in use for a while, creating a subsequent delay when starting up. As I run my system 24/7 as a server, this is a persistent irritation.
However, overall it appears to be a perfectly good and reliable disk system that generally works fine.

I bought this drive to use with a new Mac Mini running Snow Leopard with Windows 7 on a Bootcamp partition. Having read the reviews here I decided that I didn't want to use the software that came with the drive so I erased the drive with Disk Utility, then made two partitions - My Mac Mini backup formatted to Mac OS extended, and Windows 7 backup fomatted to FAT. (Windows 7 will reformat to NTFS when installing). I then backed up my Macintosh HD to the first partition using Carbon Copy Cloner. In spite of what you can read here, this creates a bootable drive, so now I use CCC to backup instead of Time Machine. It's a very nice programme which I have used for a long time to make a bootable backup of my old Powerbook G4 (running Tiger) on to a pocketable Formac Disk Mini.
On the Windows side, I just used Backup and Restore which does a neat job and offers you the the opportunity to create a bootable repair disc on a dvd-rw. It could not be simpler. If you only use Windows it is simple to re-format the drive into NTFS or FAT.
Incidentally, I decided while doing all this, that the Bootcamp partition I had made was really too small, so, after some searching on the web, I downloaded Winclone which makes a copy of your Bootcamp partition's contents, stores it on your Mac, and then reloads it after you have made a new Bootcamp partition. Easy!
The drive is finished in a nice brushed aluminium which goes well with the Mac Mini and Powerbook and is quite small and unobtrusive sitting on a windowsill in front of my desk. I only use the Firewire 800 cable although it comes with USB cable as well.
All in all an great product at a good price. Highly recommended.

Windows 7 does not recognize the drive out of the box. All you will see is the installation files as a CD Rom within My Computer. You will need to use Windows' disk management tool to format the drive. See the WD website under installation for full instructions. Once I followed these, the drive worked perfectly.