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Western Digital My Book 500GB Essential USB2.0 External Hard Drive
 
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Western Digital My Book 500GB Essential USB2.0 External Hard Drive

by Western Digital
3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (149 customer reviews) More about this product

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Technical Details

  • Product Description: My Book Essential Edition WDG1U5000 - hard drive - 500 GB - Hi-Speed USB
  • Type: Hard drive - external
  • Dimensions (WxDxH): 14.1 cm x 17.1 cm x 5.7 cm
  • Weight: 1.3 kg
  • Capacity: 500 GB
  • Interface Type: Hi-Speed USB
  • Connector: 4 pin USB
  • Data Transfer Rate: 480 Mbps
  • Average Seek Time: 8.9 ms
  • Spindle Speed: 7200 rpm
  • Buffer Size: 16 MB
  • OS Required: Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition, Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition, Microsoft Windows XP, Apple MacOS X 10.2.8 or later
  • Power: AC 120/230 V ( 50 - 60 Hz )
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Product details

  • Product Dimensions: 17 x 14.1 x 5.7 cm ; 1.3 Kg
  • Boxed-product Weight: 2.3 Kg
  • Delivery Destinations: Visit the Delivery Destinations Help page to see where this item can be delivered.
    Find out more about our Delivery Rates and Returns Policy
  • Item model number: WDG1U5000E
  • ASIN: B000EXZB0M
  • Date first available at Amazon.co.uk: 11 April 2006
  • Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (149 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 4,627 in Electronics & Photo (See Bestsellers in Electronics & Photo)

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Product Description

Manufacturer's Description

Small, simple, elegant, and very easy to use. Just plug it in, and you've got plenty of room to back up and save your valuable data, music, photos, and movies.The elegant case, iconic of a book, takes up less space on your desk, stacks horizontally, and allows two or more drives to nestle neatly together like volumes on a shelf. SmartPower automatic power on/off and LED activity lights make this drive especially easy to use. Inside the case is an exceptionally fast (7200 RPM spin speed), ultra quiet, cool-running hard drive from WD, of course!

Product Description

Western Digital Plug Mybook 500Gb HD
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Customer Reviews

149 Reviews
5 star:
 (54)
4 star:
 (17)
3 star:
 (10)
2 star:
 (12)
1 star:
 (56)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
3.0 out of 5 stars (149 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
45 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Quiet, discrete external HDD, 17 Jan 2007
By John "John" (SURREY United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
Bought this external drive to store music files and photos. It runs very quietly so is ideal for siting in a lounge or TV room, where ambient noise would be a nuisance.

Comes with minimal documentation, although there is a web link where additional manuals and tech support can be found. Pleased to say, I needed neither. Plugged drive into the mains adapator and a USB port, Windows Explorer found it automatically and I was able to use it immediately.

Access speed seems fine. It took about 90 mins to write 150GB of music files, read speeds present no problem. My drive feeds Slimserver and a Squeezebox without any difficulty.

My only minor complaint and not enough to drop 1 star: The manual makes a reference to the FAT/ NFTS formatting issue, but the warning could be more explicit (if you start using FAT default you need to reformat the entire drive to switch to NFTS). That said, the drive is empty when you get it, so Windows Quick format option does the trick and formats in NFTS in about 10 seconds. Just make sure you know what format you need before using the drive.
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106 of 111 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Nice backup external drive, 22 Jan 2007
By Matt Haswell "morbius29" (London, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
Nicely boxed, containing usb cable (about 1.5m), power block and power cables - both British and American. Nicely solid metal "pages", despite the black plastic "book cover". Quite stylish green circle on the side, although not ultra bright.

It doesn't power on until you plug in the usb cable as well as the obvious power cable, but once set up it is automatically picked up by Windows 2000 (or above) and starts up a window asking if you want to install Google software (toolbar for IE, Google desktop search and Picasa), Acrobat and the pdf manual or Western Digital disk tools. WD Tools seem slightly pointless apart from a disk eraser tool but even then I would download a free open source military grade version from the internet to use rather than theirs. The WD tests just seem to say Pass or Fail - would have liked to see more information about these. Apparently the disk contained is a SATA WDC WD5000KS disk.

Copied 1.9gigabytes (as measured by Windows folder properties rather than the 2gb WD would call it) as represented by 2500 files, to the disk in about 7minutes 35seconds - so a rough throughput of 250megabytes a minute. Very quiet buzz&clicking when writing data - not bad considering you can actually look in through the cooling vents and see the physical disk inside.
Gets slightly warm after extended effort so placing it on it's end like an actual book seems best due to the cooling slots then available on top.

It powers itself down from it's already quiet state to utterly silent after about 15minutes and then takes about 7 seconds to power back up if you access it. Very quiet unless on a resonating surface (i.e. a wooden desk) when it makes a slight hum from the vibration - however the supplied sticky rubber feetpads only have mounting points if it's laid down on it's side so you'll need to improvise.

All in all, a very good drive for backups at a very good price point.

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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Avoid at ALL costs!, 30 April 2008
By Mustafa Kulle "Undead_Turk" (UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
I had this hard drive for 17 months and it did it's job well, so I thought. Suddenly, it began to make strange noises. But the next time I turned on my computer, it couldn't recognize the hard drive, and I can no longer access the drive or any of the files.

Sure, there will be Technical Support but it's absolutely useless because they don't help at all.

I have now lost 500 gigs of Valuable data! And I will never get it back.

Please do not ignore the negative reviews here because they are true and if this hasn't happened to you yet, I advise you to back up your work now because this hard drive will go bust when you least expect it.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars No issues
Have had this drive for probably three years or more and have been using it as the backup drive for Apple's Time Machine since Oct 2008. Read more
Published 16 days ago by Ivon of Windermere

1.0 out of 5 stars Very disappointing & Poor back up
Mine stopped working after 10 months and I just got the run around from Western Digital, who tried to say it was my computer at fault. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Ken

1.0 out of 5 stars Western? Definitely COWBOY outfit !
This has been failing on and off since new. I would NOT buy from this company again. I would even look to see if they are selling under a different name, or another company is... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Mr. P. Davis

1.0 out of 5 stars RUBBISH HARD DRIVE - do NOT buy -
DO NOT BUY THIS HARD DRIVE

thats it, I am currently helping a friend who has lost an immense amount of work on this "storage device" - it died on him spectacularly... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Komfortablynum

3.0 out of 5 stars I must have been lucky
I bought the 320GB version of this over three years ago and its not let me down yet although reading the reviews I appear to be have been lucky. Read more
Published 4 months ago by nivensfridge

1.0 out of 5 stars The WD catch
I purchased a WD My Book in 2007 from Amazon and it has worked well. But there is something else to consider when buying computer equipment. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Trumpf

1.0 out of 5 stars Gave up after 2 years
Bought this to add some extra storage, quickly and easily. Was working fine for a couple of years, with the odd glitch, but nothing that I couldn't handle. Read more
Published 9 months ago by N. Bowman

2.0 out of 5 stars Good HD but with several flaws
I bought this hard drive dec 2007 and recently it's not detectable when I connect to my laptop. I even tried to connect it to other pc but still the outcome remain the same. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Samuel

4.0 out of 5 stars great drive.
really useful to have one of these. i've had mine for two years, and had no problem with it. it only makes a little noise, and shouldn't need any software to use, making it easy... Read more
Published 11 months ago by Andy Cook

5.0 out of 5 stars Reliable, cheap, good buy
I have been waiting quite long before posting this review because my main concern about HDs is reliability and I wanted to see what happened on the long run. Read more
Published 12 months ago by Mr. A. Tanca

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