Western Digital My Book Essential 500GB

WD My Book Essential external USB 2.0 HDD. Absolutely brilliant both in looks, item size, performance, purchase and running costs.

I now have a bank of 5 of these all running 24/7 for storage and automatic incremental backups of my home entertainment and media system. All I use is the software provided. The power saving feature is brilliant and does not interfere with the overall performance at all.

I have now changed 3 of the 500 Gb Hard Drives for larger ones, 1Tb and 1.5 Tb, without any problems, the case is not difficult to open if you insert a blade between the outer cover and pop the clips, spread it a little then slide the outer cover off, reassembly is just as easy and the case is undamaged. My drives are WD Green variety SATA and they run very cool even at high loadings and are virtually silent too.

Thsi is the type of backup I will go for every time! At £54.00 for this it was a steal!

Overall, the Western Digital My Book Essential 500Gb is a great piece of hardware. USB transfer speeds were slow, but worked.

I had to format it to NTFS. The software is total garbage, and it's just Google software, and not useful at all.