 Best Sellers Recently Viewed | | Home Western Digital My Book Essential 1.5 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive | |
|  | |  | | | Western Digital My Book Essential 1.5 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive | | | | | | | |
List Price:
| $149.99 | |
Our Price:
| $139.00 | |
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| $10.99 ( 7%)
| | *Shipping: | $6.14 | |
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| | | SKU:
00A2GX-000 | | In Stock | | Availability:
Usually ships in 1-2 business days | | Only 4 left in stock, order soon! | | |
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| | Features | Automatic, continuous backupVisual drive control centerPassword protection and 256-bit encryptionIlluminated capacity gaugeUSB 2.0 interface
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| | Description | The world’s best-selling external hard drive now features a new, smart, visual backup solution that protects your data automatically. Smaller, sleeker, more streamlined design - WD has made these award-winning drives even smaller, sleeker, and more elegant. As always, this book-like shape takes up less space on your desk and allows two or more My Book drives to nestle neatly together like volumes on a shelf. WD SmartWare - A control center for your drive that gives you the power to: Protect your data automatically - Relax. Your data is secure. Automatic, continuous backup will instantly make a second copy whenever you add or change a file. See your backup as it happens - Seeing is believing. Visual backup displays your content categories and shows the progress of your backup. Bring back lost files effortlessly - Retrieve your valuable data to its original location whether you’ve lost all your data or just overwritten an important file. Take control - Customize your backup, set drive security, run diagnostics, manage the power settings, and more from the WD SmartWare control center. Drive lock - Gain peace of mind knowing that your data is protected from unauthorized access or theft with password protection and military-grade 256-bit hardware-based encryption. Illuminated capacity gauge - See at a glance how much space is available on your drive. USB 2.0 interface - A simple connection that offers convenience and compatibility among multiple computers. Power miser - My Book external drives are designed to save energy. WD GreenPower Technology lowers internal drive power consumption by up to 30%, a sleep mode reduces power during idle times, and a power-saving feature turns the drive on and off with your computer. Planet friendly - We designed a small box to minimize waste and used recycled material. We encourage you to recycle it. Ready to plug-and-play with Windows PCs - if you’re a Mac user, check out our Mac version of this product. | |
| | Product Details | | Product Length: | 5.56 inches | | Product Width: | 6.9 inches | | Product Height: | 7.94 inches | | Product Weight: | 2.97 pounds | | Package Length: | 8.0 inches | | Package Width: | 6.9 inches | | Package Height: | 5.5 inches | | Package Weight: | 3.3 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 21 reviews |
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| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review: ( 21 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
81 of 97 found the following review helpful:
 This drive has serious issues Oct 11, 2009
By Wildness
This drive is embedded with Western Digital's SmartWare virtual CD that will ALWAYS and FOREVER boot to your Mac computer. This Virtual CD cannot be disabled, unmounted, removed, eradicated, or partitioned away - EVERY!!!!! It says so right on WD's website buried in the tech support area, not on the box where this kind of "don't-buy-our-product" warning belongs. Western Digital has decided to embed their Virtual CD Smartware into this drive so that you cannot, under any circumstances, disable or remove the VCD. It will forever mount this unwanted intrusion to your Mac (Windows is no better apparently) and their website essentially tells you that you can do nothing about it.
Can you tell that I am upset?!? I own seven other Western Digital hard drives and I will not own this one. Nor will I buy another in the future out of fear of getting the same results.
Like many people, I have no need for their backup or security software as I just want external drivers for pure storage. If I were to buy more of these like I had planned, My desktop would be cluttered with a bunch of meaningless virtual CDs. This intrusion may not annoy Windows users as the Virtual CDs will just clutter up your "My Computer" window; but, on a Mac this type of unalterable intrusion is beyond unacceptable. I cannot believe that Western Digital could not see the alienation of every Mac user on the planet from ten miles away on this one.
Western Digital and other drive makers have, for a while now, put their software install packages onto the external hard drives that they sell; but, it has always been just stored on the drive where it can be deleted or is removed when the drive is reformatted - at worst it was on a separate partition that could be removed. But, not with this new version (version 3?) of the My Book Essential Drives where it is embedded into the drive's hardware and cannot be deactivated. Until Western Digital rethinks their strategy and changes this practice, their hard drives should be avoided and boycotted.
(For more information, see all of the review on the 1TB version of this drive.)
UPDATE: After returning the Essentials drive, I purchased two of Western Digital's Elements External 1TB Hard Drives; Exactly what I needed in the first place... an external hard drive that is built like a tank and is only what it is supposed to be: a hard drive. No "fancy" value-added software embedded in the hardware to muck up the works on this drive. I highly recommend the Western Digital Elements external hard drives for all of your storage needs!
10 of 11 found the following review helpful:
 new firmware solution Dec 24, 2009
By PlainWhite
The problem that many people had with this drive was the fact that the firmware did not allow one to turn off the WD propriety software. Well, WD has now released a firmware update that allows one to turn off all of the software management of the hard drive. Now the drive works excellently and is a good value.
6 of 6 found the following review helpful:
Much ado about nothing... cheap and steady. Apr 07, 2010
By Mark Marshall
I bought the 1.5tb version from a local Best Buy. Yep - it has the software on it, but really - you're not forced to use it, and for me it was as simple as grabbing the MyBook software and dragging it into its' own folder.
The drive didn't auto-install anything at all. It's quiet, with a boatload of space. My only complaint is that it does go to sleep - so if I haven't used it in a while, it takes 2-3 seconds to access it - but then it runs just fine.
I'd buy another one in a heartbeat.
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
Dead on arrival Oct 23, 2009
By E
Have a 500 gig WD drive, it was a little squirely, but I'd give that one 5 stars. This one was from Best Buy, Dead on arrival. Poop. Gonna try another brand. (Even if it DID work, it felt cheap. I wasn't impressed.) Come on now WD.
9 of 12 found the following review helpful:
HOW DO YOU SPELL DEAD Oct 23, 2009
By Mayank K. Kothari
I had two of these who died within a year. WD has gone bad to worse.
See all 21 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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